Is carbon neutrality a hoax?

Only $10,000 to have carbon neutral movie?

A few weeks ago I was at the Hollywood goes Green event, and at one of the sessions, Patrick Nye of LEED AP Bonneville, told the audience that the average Hollywood movie can achieve carbon neutrality for only about $10,000.

Thus, a movie such as Titanic can rake in 10's of millions of dollars in profit, but such a movie only owes $10,000 to the environment? Somehow those numbers just don't add up for me, but I chose not to post a story then because I didn't want to be negative.

Then today, I read about the first carbon neutral college campus, and again felt uneasy with carbon neutrality. Why? Did the ecology college achieve carbon neutrality by directly offsetting its emissions with solar and wind power? Nope, it helped fund a program that optimizes street lights so that cars don't idle as much.

Obviously, doing something is better than nothing, but carbon-offsetting does not make a person, a company or a college green, and in some cases it is probably an excuse not to really be green.

For example, spending $10,000 so a movie can hype its green cred is probably an advertising bargain, a PR coupe. I'd be much more impressed with a movie that invested money in developing its own green electricity via solar-powered film studios.