The latest fad is to tout a project’s carbon-reduction benefits as a contribution to fighting climate change. For example, with all seriousness, project supporters will make a series of intellectual contortions to calculate the amount of carbon saved on a congested freeway, under the assumption that their capacity-building project reduces the amount of stop-and-go driving. They conveniently ignore the more obvious and intuitive fact that making it easier to drive means more people will drive, and more driving means more carbon, not less.
