In a bizarre twist, the conservative Washington Times, which would normally be critical of fuzzy environmental strategies like carbon offsets, is actually attacking the candidates for not offsetting all their campaign emissions. Opening with an absurd headline, "Green crusades lot of talk," the Times writes:

Sens. John McCain and Barack Obama have called for strict mandatory limits to control greenhouse gases but they aren't leading by example -- each has failed to pay for offsets to cover all of his campaign's carbon emissions.

How does not taking (dubious) voluntary actions carry any implications about one's commitment to serious mandatory limits? Advocating mandatory limits is based on an understanding that two decades of the voluntary approach has not reversed emissions trends. And again and again we've seen how offsets provide at best a limited environmental benefit.

Surely the WT can find more things stories to write about. I've heard it said that Senator McCain has called for carbon limits that are in fact mandatory, but he refuses to call them mandatory. Nah, no story there ...

This post was created for ClimateProgress.org, a project of the Center for American Progress Action Fund.