stock tip? con game?

By Diogenes ( articles ) | Jul 13, 2007

Easily the oddest story coming out of Rome this week is the news that the Vatican has become the world's first "carbon-neutral" state, by planting enough trees in a Hungarian forest to offset the Vatican's CO2 emissions. The announcement was made jointly by Planktos, a for-profit environmental firm, and the Pontifical Council for Culture.

And if you're now wondering why the Pontifical Council for Culture is handling questions about CO2 emissions, you're beginning to share our bewilderment.

The American Papist blog had a long and thoughtful piece on this story, asking the right questions. Notice that I don't say the Papist asked all the right questions, because there are so many questions that could be asked. Still, I'll confine myself to just one:

Cui bono?

It's obvious what Planktos gets out of this deal: A whole lot of publicity. Two days ago I hadn't heard of Planktos. Now I have, and so have you. The firm hopes that you and I will buy our own plots in the Hungarian forest, so that we too can be carbon-neutral. Now they can show us a quote from Cardinal Poupard, implicitly endorsing the idea. It's not often that a Prince of the Church plugs a commercial product.

But what does the Vatican get? Yes, Planktos made an in-kind contribution; the Vatican won't actually pay for those trees planted in Hungary. That's nice, certainly. But it's fairly standard policy in the advertising biz. When you see the star quarterback in a TV spot endorsing a local automobile dealership, you can be reasonably sure he didn't pay the list price for his new SUV. And in this case the Vatican doesn't have anything as tangible as an SUV: just a piece of paper attesting to its sponsorship for a tract of forest land. Which is... well, it's nice. But it still leaves you wondering why the Vatican-- why the Pontifical Council for Culture-- would think it's enough to justify a commercial plug.

Our friend the American Papist is rightly troubled by this line in the press release:

Planktos/KlimaFa has further committed to work with the Vatican and the Pontifical Council of Culture to develop methods to calculate the CO2 emissions of individual Catholic churches and offer ecorestoration options to turn their carbon footprints green.

You can almost imagine the Planktos salesman's line, approaching, say, the head of a Mexican diocese: "Gee, Bishop Nació Ayer, the Vatican wanted to be carbon-neutral. I just thought you'd make it a high priority for your diocese, too."

And just by the way, what sort of help does Planktos expect from the Vatican in determining the CO2 emissions at your parish? Ordinarily you wouldn't expect to find that sort of expertise in the Pontifical Council for Culture.

Enough. Just thinking about the whole thing makes me hot under the collar-- thereby contributing to global warming. I'm going to run out and plant a tree. But for the foreseeable future, whenever you mention the Pontifical Council for Culture, I'm going to think about that forest in Hungary, and how fast the trees are being planted there.

Yessir, you could almost say there's one born every minute.