Several people have sent me invitations to this Facebook application called (Lil) Green Patch. The invitation says “Here is a Jenny Appleseed plant for your (Lil) Green Patch. Could you help me by sending a plant back? Together we can fight Global Warming!”
So a little research later, I have learned that this game is a tamagotchi garden, where you share plants with people. It is one of the most popular Facebook games, with either 500,000 or 50,000 daily active users (there was a typo on the page!) It is driven by ad revenue, and the maker of the game gives a portion of the ad revenue to The Nature Conservancy to buy rainforest land. So far they have given $33,600. So that is less than ten cents for every active daily user. They are probably making 10 cents per active user every day. Does the carbon offset from buying the trees cover for the server farm required to run the application? To play annoying nay-sayer, what in the world is this teaching people about how to ‘Fight Global Warming?” It is teaching them that advertising will save the day, and that greenwashing is the way to go.
Okay, that was a rant.
One Comment
Of course, the users have to run computers as well.
Carbon offsets also are very over-rated. Some criticisms are raised here:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Carbon_offset#Controversies
Those are just two more points that come to mind.