British Petroleum Is The Coolest!

As has been pointed out recently, both on WW and by the lefty blog-o-wonks, this week has seen a bit of a snow-job from Welch's folks in DC. Yeah, there was all of the rigmarole about Welchie's "original" co-sponsorship of the Woolsey bill, the predictable back-and-forth it set off by those paying attention, and the usual hum-drummery that followed on the discussion boards. However, as we posted yesterday, there hasn't been too much of a deal about it in the MSM. Why? We have our suspicions.

Essentially, Welchie's midnight madness "press release" to one of the blog-wonks about his little Woolsey switcharoo seems to be the first savvy move of Welchie's tenure, at least from a PR perspective. After dealing with angry constituents for a few weeks, including letters like this one coming in hourly, Welch's people got smart. "Nancy and Steny don't want us to do this," they thought, "but our hard-core supporters do."

So, what's the solution?

Well, the hard-core anti-war people are on the net, right, but Steny and Nancy probably don't read WW (at least yet). So, they put the Woolsey co-sponsorship out to the "netroots," but keep it out of the Free Press. That covers both sides, right? Pretty sharp stuff...did someone put a call in to Dwyer on that one?

Regardless, the whole mess has overshadowed some other actions that Welch's people want in the news, the real news, much more badly than the Woolsey thing. That's why Welchie's official House site makes a big to-do about this "carbon neutrality" thing. Combined with last week's clear google bombing of Welchie's remarks on global warming, ("stunning," he calls it) we may be seeing that Welchie's PR operation is finally learning "the ropes."

Switching the focus from Welch's war stance, or the clear lack thereof, to something as universally left, while NOT making Nancy and Steny look silly, is a worthwhile enterprise. So, we'll see if they can pull it off.

It might be harder to do than they think.

There are a few reasons why the whole "Welch-as-environmental-crusader" thing doesn't really play too well with us at WW, or should it, for that matter, with anyone who has paid attention to Welch's personal interests in the field of environmental stewardship over the past few years. This brings us to the idea behind the whole "carbon neutrality" thing. As this article in Roll Call (subscription) suggests, this is part of Welch's peeps' effort to make him the "coolest Congressman" in DC.

Cute, right?

Except it don't exactly fly. Why not? Well, let's start out with a basic examination of what carbon neutrality, or "carbon offsetting" means. It means paying someone to do something which will get rid of carbon, like plant some trees, in order to make up for your actions. Which is exactly what Welch did. He paid $672, to be exact, and out of his own pocket.

$672. That's it.

Not a huge deal, but doing this, we guessed, would be better than doing nothing, right? Turns out we were wrong. Who says, you might be asking? Well, check out this whole issue of The New Internationalist, not exactly a conservative publication, on why carbon offsetting is actually worse than doing nothing. Go ahead and check it out, there are all kinds of arguments in there. One in particular caught our eye, especially in the context of Welch's recent behavior: carbon offsetting is tokenism. That is, it makes people think you are doing something, while you are really doing nothing, in this case, not actually reducing emissions. One author puts it this way:

"..it is OK to fly and drive so long as you pay some third party a small fee to ease your conscience? That we can consume our way out of a problem caused by our consumption in the first place?"

Hmm, that's an interesting way to think about it: is it actually worse to make people think you are somehow solving the problem, in that they then do not change their behavior, than it would be to do nothing? It certainly strikes us as a compelling argument.

This, combined with the shift-the-focus PR spin Welchie's office is getting down with, only becomes worse when we consider where the $672 in personal income that Welch paid for the carbon offsetting may have come from. One source of personal income for Welch, for example, is from oil stocks. And, tah-dah, from energy stocks.

Yeah, it gets worse.

Check it out in Welch's personal finance filing here: it's on page 7. That's right, it says that before Welch ran for Congress he owned "between $15,001 and $50,0000" worth of stock in BP. That's not the "BP" that stands for "Bennington Produce." No, it stands for British Petroleum, the same company that, according to this article on thinkprogress.org (again, not too conservative, they) spilled up to 267,000 gallons of crude in Prudhoe Bay, Alaska. The same BP that apparently supports "police terror" in Colombia. To bring us full circle, it's the same BP evidently responsible for much of the corporate egging-on of, wait for it, the war in Iraq. Yes, BP was one of the biggest oil companies to profit from the Iraq war. Last time we checked, a corporation is owned by its stockholders, right?

Oh yeah, on the report right above "BP" it says that Welch owned up to $15,000 worth of stock in Duke Energy, too. We would start in on them, but hey, isn't the BP part enough to make you at least wince a little? Suffice it to say, they have had their brushes with federal investigators. Environmental federal investigators.

So, let us be the first to ask it: how much would Welch have to pay to offset up to $65,000 worth of stock in two of the most environmentally destructive, carbon producing companies in the entire world?

Well, we don't know. But it's certainly enough to make us question the sincerity of Welchie's new focus on carbon offsetting, his being "stunned" at the profits of oil companies, or whatever other spin comes out of his office in an attempt to live up to his lefty claims while not rocking the D-boat in Washington.

Really, considering the above, shouldn't any thinking person do the same?