Carbon offsets: City of Millbrae bites the cheese

With all due pomp and ceremony, the city of Millbrae, Calif., on Thursday announced that it was going to help bring down the global warming ogre.

The city has become the first in San Mateo County to join PG&E’s ClimateSmart program, a program in which people (and now, municipal governments) with more dollars than sense can volunteer to pay more for their electricity and natural gas.

The voluntary surcharge is supposed to go toward planting trees to help reduce the dreaded “carbon footprint” of participants.

The only thing smart about the ClimateSmart program is the way PG&E has managed to trick customers into opening their wallets and being happy about it.

This sort of thing used to be called a rate increase, and utilities in California used to have to get approval for them. Apparently, if you call it a carbon offset, then the sky’s the limit.

Plus, it gets the utility off the hook for not supplying “green” energy in the first place. Consider: Customers are actually paying a surcharge to the utility that provided the energy that created the “carbon footprint.” That’s like buying a steak and then agreeing to a price markup so the butcher can clean up the blood. … Hello?

Amid all the hoopla, Millbrae officials neglected to mention how much taxpayer money they’re going to spend enriching PG&E.

Meanwhile, Millbrae schools are in such a state that they’ve had to place Measure P, a $78 parcel tax, on the ballot in hopes of raising $400,000 to keep their custodians, librarians and other services.

Schools are drowning under the state’s draconian budget cuts, but the Millbrae council is happy to throw away money on fiddling with the Earth’s thermostat.

That’s not just smart … it’s ClimateSmart!