Welcome to the Cato Daily Podcast for Wednesday June 27th. This is Anastasia

Yuglova, your host. On the official Google blog, a few days ago, the search engine

giant promised to go carbon neutral by the end of 2007. Among their goals, reduce energy

consumption by maximizing efficiency,

invest in and use renewable energy sources,

and purchase carbon offsets for the emissions that they can't reduce directly.

So what is Google up to?

Cato's Jerry Taylor gives us his two cents in this podcast.

Jerry, what do companies mean when they pledge to become carbon neutral?

Well, it might mean they're planning on going out of business. mean when they pledge to become carbon neutral?

Well, it might mean they're planning on going out of business, but in Google's case, that's

certainly not in play.

For the most part, what they mean is they're either going to make investments to reduce the

amount of greenhouse gas emissions

associated with their business operations or they're going to use some of their products

to pay someone else to reduce greenhouse gas emissions to offset the greenhouse gas emissions that's associated

with their business. Usually when we hear about carbon offsets we're hearing

about the latter and not the former, which means that if you're a profitable enterprise like

Google and you got a lot of capital sitting around it's a fairly easy thing to

buy carbon offsets from somebody who promises to engage in reduction somewhere else.

Carbon offsets, what are those exactly?

Carbon offsets are investments which would pay someone else to reduce their

...