| Sourced From |
Bill Townsend is a brainy, easy-speaking former Louisianan and oilman who founded a couple of companies and spent 16 years in the energy business before migrating to Utah about 20 years ago.
Partner Greg Spencer grew up in the Midwest and came to Salt Lake City in the 1970s to study geography and to ski. He eventually became a lawyer, working for American Stores. In 1999, he helped sell the Salt Lake City-based grocery chain to rival Albertsons Inc. in an $8.7 billion deal.
The two are evangelical Christians who met at a Bible study class just a stone’s throw from where the carbon trading company they later founded is located, in the Cottonwood Corporate Center in Holladay.
Townsend, 55, and Spencer, 52, are self-styled environmental capitalists. Others have called them Christian capitalists and carbon entrepreneurs. Whatever they’re called, their company, Blue Source LLC, is at the vortex of a growing, but controversial, voluntary carbon emissions offset sector advocated by strategies that serve as one of the cornerstones of the Obama administration’s energy policy..
Proponents, such as Townsend and Spencer, claim carbon trading has the potential to cleanse millions of cubic tons of greenhouse gases from the atmosphere, while providing a bridge from a carbon-based economy to a future where energy comes from hydrogen fuel cells, solar, wind or some other technology yet to be discovered.
Critics contend that carbon trading simply pushes pollution from one place to another, and that although strides have been made, the market-based technique for controlling global warming hasn’t lived up to promises.
“The way we would judge the voluntary program is whether it has successfully reduced emissions to a level where the problem is going away or under control. The voluntary approach has not succeeded in doing that,” said John Coequyt, senior Washington representative for The Sierra Club.
–
Market emerges
Related posts: