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Cliff Kuang recently wrote a piece at GOOD Magazine that takes after my own heart.

He tells a nice story about his recent experience at a “green” themed consumer electronics show in New York. At the show, he was offered an application for a green credit card. The card awarded one ton of carbon offsets for every $1000 spent by the card holder. One ton of carbon offsets is worth $8-12 dollars.

Most credit card holders will recognize that a $10 return (on average) per thousand spent is a very cheap reward relative to most other (airline mileage or cash-based) credit card reward programs. (For those who don’t: most programs return $25-50 of value per thousand spent.) The response of the booth’s attendant, when questioned: “…it doesn’t really matter what it costs, for people that care about green.”

This kind of emotional blackmail is just what I hate about the green design movement: It uses an important value (ecology) as a way to take advantage of unthinking consumers. It’s bad enough that the value itself is cheapened in the process, but it’s truly awful to consider that the consumer actually ends up paying to cheapen it.

The reason that the green credit card provides such a potent example of this phenomenon is because it’s not just more bullsh*t — it’s actually internally contradictory. It incentivizes people to increase their consumption level, a behavior which in all likelihood negatively overcompensates for the relatively negligible good of the reward.

In other words, it rewards you (and relatively poorly, remember, you’re subsidizing this reward) to engage in ecologically destructive behavior with less potent ecologically beneficial dividends.

Kuang’s lesson here is an important one: “being ‘green’ is chiefly about your behavior and daily habits.” Rest assured that no credit card is sufficiently motivated to help you with those.