Blankley on Gore and indulgences

Lisa posts here Tony Blankley's comparison of Al Gore's claim that his purchase of carbon-credits excuses his high levels of energy consumption with "what the Catholic Church calls 'indulgentia a culpa et a poena'", and asks if anyone has any reactions.

I am no fan of Al Gore, agree that many self-styled environmentalists are smug hypocrites, and agree also that there is a not-insignificant strand of irrational (which, I guess, Blankley thinks is the same thing as "religious") thinking in some quarters of the environmentalist movement.  Still . . . the comparison seems silly. 

Al Gore's claim, if I understand it, is not that buying carbon offsets earns him forgiveness or expiation for the sin of energy consumption; his claim, instead, is that he is actually preventing, or undoing, the wrong or harm that his consumption would otherwise cause.  That is, by purchasing the offset, the idea is that he avoids doing wrong at all (because he engineers things so that his net contribution to the carbon problem is reduced), not that he expresses concretely his contrition.

As for the "animistic" church - - again, I don't think highly of Gore, but I wonder how many people -- even those whose environmentalism has a "religious" vibe -- really believe that "any using or changing of the physical world (such as burning carbon) is a sin against the sacred, holistic, living world (the Gaia hypothesis)."