Environmental Indulgences?

Tony Blankley commented recently on "why the environmental movement tends to veer toward a religious, rather than a scientific, sensibility."  He observes that:

the signs of religiousness are readily to be seen. Al Gore and his Hollywood coterie have almost comically manifested one aspect of their new religion in the last few weeks -- the sense of sin and the search for remission of such sin.

At the Academy Awards last month, their spokesman proudly announced that this year's show was "the first green Oscars." These vast consumers of energy -- in their 30,000-sqare-foot houses, their Gulfstream jets and even in their high-energy consumption film production process -- claimed green remission of sin by virtue of driving the last hundred yards to the Kodak Theatre in Priuses and by buying carbon credits.

Likewise, when Al Gore was revealed to be using high quantities of energy to heat and cool his large home, he claimed it was OK because he had purchased carbon offset credits. Substantively, these offsets are of dubious environmental value (see Daily Telegraph article: "Is Carbon Offsetting a Con"; BBC's "U.K. to Tackle Bogus Carbon Schemes"; Wall St. Journal's "The Political and Business Self-interest Behind Carbon Limits.")

But as, what the Catholic Church calls "indulgentia a culpa et a poena" (release from guilt and from punishment), paying carbon offset fees makes perfect religious sense. The Christian sinner pays the church for "a remission of the temporal punishment due, in God's justice, to sin that has been forgiven, which remission is granted by the church in the exercise of the powers of the keys, through the application of the superabundant merits of Christ and of the saints, and for some just and reasonable motive." (Catholic Encyclopedia)

In the animistic church, any using or changing of the physical world (such as burning carbon) is a sin against the sacred, holistic, living world (the Gaia hypothesis). But as everyone uses energy (just as every Christian sins), the neo-animist church, too, must provide for a remission of sin (and also, a handy source of profit for the carbon-offset company owners -- such as Al Gore who, according to news reports, pays his indulgences to Generation Investment Management, of which he is the chairman.)

Any thoughts on this comparison to the Church's "indulgentia a culpa et a poena"?