Unhealthy Union

Cruising south of Tasmania, heading toward a planned clash in Antarctica with Japanese whalers, legendary environmental vigilante Paul Watson recounts a supposed victory in his years-long campaign to battle brigandage on the high seas.

"I think they backed down in the Galápagos because of our involvement. We don't know what their intentions are now. But I don't see them doing their plan for some time," said Watson, founder of Sea Shepherd Conservation Society, the organization famed for obstructing whalers by ramming their ships. "We just told them we were going to obstruct their operations if they showed up."

Sea Shepherd's most recent skirmish, however, didn't involve Watson's usual nemesis, Japanese factory whaling ships that flout international catch limits. Instead, Watson has taken on a new adversary: a Foster City entrepreneur who seeks to make money from the global market in carbon dioxide (CO2) offsets — a line of business whereby companies and individuals can buy forgiveness for their part in global warming.

Last month, Watson's group said it would "obstruct" Weatherbird II, a ship operated by Foster City's Russ George.

In Sea Shepherd's previous clashes with whaling ships, "obstruct" has meant blocking, boarding, putting crew under citizen's arrest, and otherwise making life difficult for anyone Watson sees as violating international law.

Watson's organization plans on monitoring the Weatherbird II as it steams around the globe seeking to buy iron filings, which it then dumps into the ocean.

Despite Watson's legendary fierceness, he's in for a real fight with George, a man with the same boundless determination as Watson.

This kind of arrangement — where polluters pay companies that promise to reduce CO2 in the environment — has grown into an entire industry that is notorious as a free-for-all zone. That's because there's little concrete evidence backing claims that money spent on CO2 credits will counteract a specific amount of greenhouse gas. George has become a standout in this dubious industry by devising a carbon-reduction scheme that environmentalists say will do more harm than good.

(George hadn't responded to telephone and e-mail inquiries by press time.)

Iron dust is a nutrient for plankton, tiny creatures that absorb CO2, a greenhouse gas that contributes to global warming. Dumping iron filings and dust into certain spots in the ocean could cause plankton to proliferate in the same way that dumping phosphate detergent in a stream might spur algae growth. George has set up a Web site allowing the CO2 emissions of a large SUV to be "zeroed" for $50 for one year.

But just as no ecologist would empty boxes of Tide into the Russian River, the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency, the World Wildlife Fund, and the U.N.-chartered International Maritime Organization, along with other environmental groups, have expressed skepticism about George's plan to spawn plankton by dumping iron filings.

Despite the criticism, the Weatherbird II set sail in November toward a secret destination. Sea Shepherd members found the boat docked in the Bahamas.

"As far as I'm concerned, it's a big snake-oil scheme," Watson said, referring to George's iron-dumping plan. "We have three ships, one here [heading toward Antarctica], one in the Atlantic, one in the Pacific. We're monitoring what they're doing. We can prevent them from doing that. We don't go into our strategies, but they're well aware that we can do that," said Watson, speaking by satellite phone.

While George's iron-dust scheme has made him an international environmental pariah, he's also dogged by critics of his other, unrelated business investments into schemes to produce energy through low-temperature nuclear fusion. It seems George has made a specialty of making outsized claims based on controversial science, and then weathering the storm of criticism that ensues in hopes of making a profit.

Steve Krivit, editor of New Energy Times, a Web magazine that follows the field of low-energy nuclear reaction (also known as cold fusion) research, has for the past couple of years chronicled the activities of George and a company he started called D2Fusion, Inc. Krivit says that much like the Planktos CO2 credit sales scheme, the scent of dubiousness has followed George into the arena of cold fusion.

In 1989, researchers in Utah declared they had achieved energy-producing nuclear fusion at room temperature in a jar of water. If true, this would have revolutionized the global economy by creating electricity nearly for free. It wasn't true. Other scientists discovered that flawed experimental and measurement techniques had resulted in exaggerated readings, which falsely suggested energy-producing fusion had taken place.

The result was that the field of low-temperature nuclear fusion research became discredited in the public mind. But a smattering of researchers around the world continued to study the phenomenon, a field of inquiry Krivit chronicles on www.newenergytimes.com.

Of particular interest to Krivit has been D2Fusion, Inc. According to the company's Web site and financial filings, D2Fusion seeks investors for a "targeted product development program to deliver proprietary solid-state energy technologies for entry-level heat and power sources."