Al Gore's New Credit Card

Filed in archive Credit on July 26, 2007

Al Gore is the environmentalist's best friend these days, but a while back it came out that his mansion uses enough energy to cause brownouts throughout the whole eastern United States, and that even the sun occasionally goes a little dimmer thanks to him. Al waved it off by saying he buys carbon offsets to make up for his energy-hogging ways. Well, there's a new credit card Al might want in his wallet.

Yesterday GE Money Bank (yes, part of General Electric) introduced the Earth Rewards MasterCard, a credit card that rewards you with carbon offsets. Instead of you getting 1% cash back like many reward cards, this card saves up all that reward money and every year on earth day it will put it toward things that are likely to reduce our greenhouse gas emissions and thus save the planet. These things might include planting trees, funding wind farms and other alternative energy sources, and, get this, harnessing methane given off by landfills and cows farting.

(I made up the cow fart part, but I'm pretty sure cow farts are a source of methane, and there are a lot of cows in the world. Can you imagine trying to capture their farts in order to offset people's greenhouse gas emissions each year?)

(Also, if you have lunch in a greenhouse and feel a little indigestion afterwards, could this be termed greenhouse gas?)

If you're not familiar with carbon offsets, it's basically a way to try to make up for the harm we do to the environment each day by our existence-our use of cars, heating, air conditioning, eating meat, etc. In theory, carbon offsets allow us to pay to have something environmentally positive done that will "offset" our "carbon footprint."

According to this Associated Press story, if you're like most people, GE says you could offset your Earth-killing ways by using its Earth Rewards credit card to buy $750 worth of stuff each month, given that this would generate $7.50 in earth-happy rewards dollars. Just don't drive your car to do the buying, and don't buy anything man-made that might have contributed to the buildup of greenhouse gases and global warming.

Hmmm... that might be hard. We'll have to ask Al how he does it.