It seems to me that D&S now has two distinctly different problems in regard to emissions from their locomotives:
They originally had a problem with the specific objection to overnight smoke in Durango that could be seen and smelled. Lots of solutions were considered including more scrubbers, gas or electric heaters in the fireboxes, a central house boiler, overfire jets with pre-heated air, better firing technique, wood fuel, better coal, and rebuilding the locomotives with gas producer fireboxes and Lempor exhausts.
Planting trees to offset a carbon footprint is the acknowledgement that there is a now a second, much larger, more general problem than the original overnight nuisance smoke in Durango. You can tell that these are two separate problems because the solution to one hardly applies to the other.
If everybody is satisfied that planting a certain number of trees solves that second problem, then it seems like an easy fix, probably a lot easier and cheaper than fixing the original overnight smoke problem. But this second problem is a problem that nobody can see and may not even exist. Even more importantly, nobody can say for sure whether any particular remedy solves this invisible problem. Aside from the issue of whatever D&S is spending today to offset their carbon, fundamentally carbon offsets cost money. And that money goes to people who do things to offset your carbon and decide when you have done enough. So that is why I see it as a very ominous slippery slope. Once you do a little to fix this problem, you acknowledge that the problem exists; and establish your obligation to completely fix it, without having any idea of the cost.
