Climate Change Chocolate, Carbon Offsets!

Sweet! Anyone receive any Climate Change Chocolate this past Valentine’s Day weekend? Well, chocolate bunny season is coming up so you might wanna bookmark this one…

I wrote about the TerraPass carbon offset chocolate offerings on Shaping Youth with a jaundiced eye toward greenwashing, since the main Bloomsberry factory is located in New Zealand, but good news! Bloomsberry chocolate manufacturer CEO Paul Pruett confirmed the TerraPass chocolate that’s sold in the U.S. is produced in the U.S.!

It’s evidently part of their business model to stay local with manufacturing, in addition to the chocolate’s recyclable wrapper and 15 tips for reducing your carbon footprint. Even better? Bloomsberry reports so far they’ve sold enough chocolate bars to offset the equivalent of:

814 passenger vehicles for 1 year
10,333 barrels oil
588 homes for 1 year
31 acres of forest preserved from deforestation
23.2 railcars worth of coal

• » See also: Grow Your Own Tree Hugger: 101 Activities to Teach Your Child How to Live Green
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So now you can ‘educate while you masticate’, kiddies! Sweet!

Mind you, many aren’t wild about carbon offsets to begin with calling them cheater beaters and worse, but TerraPass has passed the sniff test more than once with me, and genuinely ‘walks the walk’ in the reduce, reuse, recycle mindshifting before they even get to any offset chatter.

As you can see in the comments section at EnviroMom, the pro-con elucidation in the post Carbon Offsets Are A Joke (plus the hilarious Cheat Neutral video spoofing the absurdity of same) sums it all up nicely and gives a snapshot of the issue. Personally, I think no matter where you stand on the corporate partnership theories, need for regulatory monitoring, and complexity of the carbon offset issue (the TerraPass blog and their 2009 projects give you a feel for same) if you can help fund eco-friendly projects, teach kids the whys and hows of one brand over another, and seed environmental awareness early on, from fair trade actions and purchase power to walking over driving, you’re contributing to solutions-based thinking.

Seems to me, TerraPass deserves a hallpass for being agents of change, whether it’s appealing to kids with Climate Control Chocolate and toys and games, or green e-cow cause-cards that offset the whiffy gaseousness of a dozen bovines for a day, (kids ‘get it’ with grossology quick!) they’re doing some massive mindshifting worthy of applause!

My favorite one in the TerraPass post about new green gadgets?

A coin-powered metering piggy bank called The Power Hog, where you plug the tail into the outlet and the kids’ Wii or video game into the snout to show kids the cost of their media fixations.  Woohoo! THAT one is definitely getting profiled on Shaping Youth…

I hope they make an e-cause cartoon card with a piggie to align and promote it, because I truly don’t feel like they’re putting ‘lipstick on a pig’ with the important work they’re doing and it sure offsets a lot of the energy-sapping power-whining I hear among some eco-friendly colleagues.

What do you think about carbon offsets? (In chocolate, or in general?)

Sound off…I’d love to hear.

Meanwhile, check out Sonya’s piece on fair trade chocolate on Eco Child’s Play last week, and all of the fun and worthy ‘oneness with chocolate’ posts over at Coco-Zen …I’m going to go chomp some leftover chocolate…How sweet it is!

Visual Credits: Climate Change Chocolate via TerraPass, carbon balanced logo from Treehugger, Power Hog piggie from Core 77.com Greener Design Competition

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