Anchorage Daily News

When Google's main page was black Saturday, I immediately thought "gimmick." The slogan, "we've turned our lights out; now it's your turn," led me to a link for "Earth Hour." The idea is to have people around the world turn their lights out for an hour as an effort in curbing global greenhouse gas.

What a noble thing to do.

The solutions to global warming provided by corporations would be laughable if they weren't taken seriously by mainstream media and organizations, including environmental groups.

These groups think that our nation's political enterprise, undertowed by an innovative capitalist economic structure, will, like Captain America, fly in to the rescue.

We will buy our way out of the crises ("new light bulbs," say the environmentalists), trade up (time for a hybrid), make insignificant and token conservation gestures (turn out the lights for an hour), and provide incentives for corporations to be greener (cap and trade).

On BP's Web site, you can link to a "carbon footprint calculator." In the living room of a three-dimensional floor plan, a boom box pulsates like an oil rig. "The first step to lowering carbon emissions is to understand your carbon footprint."

I took BP's quiz and found out that my footprint is a whopping 11 tons a year! My wife and I don't have energy efficient light bulbs -- ding! We don't have cavity wall and loft insulation in our small apartment -- shame. We don't always switch off the lights when we leave the room -- we're bad people. I take showers because we don't have a bath.

"I'm sorry," I feel like saying after BP's quiz. "I'll work harder."

Wal-Mart also has good news for the eco-conscious: earth-friendly compact fluorescent light bulbs at the Wal-Mart price.

Wal-Mart ran a full ad in the New York Times. "No matter how Earth-friendly a product is," the ad said, "it doesn't do any good sitting on a store shelf."

The same spiraling light bulb that appears in the ad decorates the back of an Alaska Conservation Foundation circular.

The groups' solution to global warming: We'll buy our way out of this crisis.

Measuring your carbon footprint, shopping at Wal-Mart for new light bulbs, making donations to a mainstream environmental group and recycling will, of course, only make you feel better.

But individual solutions, remedies on the so-called "demand" side of our economy, will have little overall impact.

BP, for example, produces a fifth of the state's pollution, belching 10.7 million tons of CO2 a year, more than double that of all Alaska residential households and commercial buildings combined. In the next seven years, production from its tar sand holdings in Alberta are expected to generate as much as 100 million tons of CO2.

The Chuitna coal project, if approved, will doubtlessly move more carbon from ground to sky than all our minivans, trucks, SUVs and Toyota hybrids combined.

It's the suppliers, the big guys, not the little guys, who need to be the target of change. One proposal might be to tax each individual, including corporate "persons," $10 for each ton of carbon they emit per year to pay the societal costs of global warming. Under such a scenario, I'd pay $110 and BP would pay $107 million.

The money can go to all those villages succumbing to the oceans, polar bear habitat restoration, cleaning up all those oil spills and toxic waste sites. We could fund marine studies to determine just how badly we've ruined our oceans. We could use the money to dismantle neglected buildings, drilling rigs and roads (on second thought, that's industry's job). We could build more schools.

After all, like it says on BP's Web page, we're on "a climate change journey."

I can't wait to see where it will take us.

Soren Wuerth teaches English in Anchorage and lives in Girdwood.

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