The Sacramento Metro Chamber of Commerce has represented area businesses since 1895. It is currently supported by 2,500 local businesses and organizations. Perplexingly, this once-bold defender of Sacramento’s entrepreneurs has become an advocate of government controls and policies that could make entrepreneurship extinct.

The Chamber’s strange days began last September when it announced vapidly that it would support the Sacramento Air Quality Management District’s “Rule 421” campaign to prevent local residents from using their fireplaces during winter months.

Its wacky ways continued last week when it purchased “greenhouse gas credits” to “offset” the carbon impact of its “Capitol-to-Capitol” lobbying tour of Washington, D.C. by 350 Chamber delegates.

Carbon offset trading is best understood as a modern equivalent of the medieval purchase of indulgences by sinners from clerics. Just as buyers of indulgences could expiate their sins and those of non-living family members, purchasers of carbon offsets are deemed to have “neutralized” their “carbon imprint” by funding non-carbon-based energy projects. The greenhouse gases spewed into the atmosphere by the Chamber’s jet-setting citizen-lobbyists will be “offset” by funding of projects in Elk Grove and Galt to extract methane gas from dairy wastes.

Sound confusing? Even some Chamber members must be puzzled over the relationship between their East Coast lobbying trip and the decay of two prodigious loads of cow manure in the Sacramento suburbs.

What confuses us more is why area business advocates have bought into a global warming mythology whose prescriptions will increase business costs by making electricity more expensive and less reliable. We know that the earth has been growing warmer, though scientists still debate to what extent man-made greenhouse gases are responsible. And no one, not even Al Gore, has been able to tell us how much we need to control those gases or what this will cost us in lost jobs and lost comforts.

Limiting greenhouse gases will hike energy costs for U.S. manufacturers and hobble their competitiveness against their Chinese and Indian counterparts, diverting resources that would otherwise be available to produce goods and services.

Yet the Chamber, according to its press releases, has embraced the “carbon neutral” secular religion as “part of an overall business retention and expansion strategy” that “will be a foundation for the region’s economy going forward.”

Business in Sacramento is not going to “go forward” if it depends upon more costly, less accessible and often impractical energy sources like methane from cow ordure, wind and biomass. According to the U.S. Energy Information Administration, wind power – which is intermittent, volatile and unavailable during peak electricity demand – provided just 36/100 of 1 percent of U.S. electricity in 2005 and is expected to supply only 89/100 of 1 percent of U.S. electricity in 2030.

Fossil fuels used to propel cars and trucks, heat homes and businesses and power manufacturing are far more efficient. But they are responsible for about 98 percent of U.S. carbon dioxide emissions, 24 percent of methane emissions and 18 percent of nitrous oxide emissions. Are Chamber members prepared to stop using carbon fuels to power their offices, plants and vehicles? Or will they be willing to pay thousands of dollars for “carbon offsets” instead?

Whoever’s agenda the Chamber has undertaken, it has nothing to do with promoting commerce.