Should You Carbon Offset if You Fly?
In my previous blog I talked about how you can donate money to organizations which run projects to offset carbon emissions if you fly. Like everything else, they have their pros and cons.
Some of the issues associated with carbon offsets are:
- Planting trees is a commonly-used offset project because trees absorb carbon dioxide from the atmosphere—including, presumably, that spewed from jet engines. But trees absorb carbon at different rates depending on where they are planted, and they are susceptible to disease and natural disasters; or they may be felled or burnt before they mature. If they don’t last their lifetime, they aren’t offsetting the carbon people pay for.
- Well-meaning projects don’t always work out as planned. For example, young fruit trees were donated to disadvantaged women in India, to offer them an income source, as well as helping to mop up carbon emissions. But two-thirds of the trees died. Some of the women said they weren’t given water for the trees. This may have been an education issue, a lack of funding, poor administration, or all of these combined.
- When you donate to a charity, you don’t normally control which projects your money supports. It’s the same with carbon offsets, and some people view this as a disadvantage. However, Continental Airlines decided to offer their customers a choice — “our European customers preferred to fund projects in developing countries while our American passengers wanted to contribute to projects in their own backyard,” they said.
- Carbon offsetting provides an easy and cheap way of undoing harm. As such, it does not encourage individuals to make other eco-friendly changes in their lives. At approximately 10 percent of the cost of the plane ticket, it is easier to pay, than to reduce your energy use at home for example. It’s possible that carbon offsets may encourage people to fly more, not less.
On the other hand, there are of course big advantages to carbon offsetting.
- Carbon offsetting raises awareness of the problems of air travel.
- Some projects are very successful and would not have been started without the donations.
- For the sake of the environment, we need to reduce the amount we fly. Yet flying is set to increase for at least the next 10 years. So at least carbon offsetting will help, as the number of flights increases globally.
- It’s not very expensive, and it’s easy to do.
- Globally, neither governments nor businesses are doing as much as is needed to help fight the climate crisis. We all need to work together to solve the problem of climate change, and carbon offsets are something that each of us as an individual can do.
- When you donate, you might be funding trees to create new habitat for animals and helping to stop declining biodiversity. You could be providing employment to local people You might be funding solar-powered cookers in Africa which means less time spent collecting wood-fuel and more time in school for kids – and better health without smoke in the home.
Carbon offset programs are not a total solution, but an important part. One carbon offsetter, Justine Johnson, a veterinarian from East Greenwich, R.I., paid more than $200 at myclimate.org to offset the impact of her car and plane trips for the year. She wasn’t sure it going to make a massive difference, but she said that it “was such a small investment that I figured I would do it anyway. Mainly I was casting a vote. I thought that if enough people demonstrate a willingness to put money toward solving this problem, then maybe the government will start listening.”
My Thoughts on Carbon Offsetting
Is carbon offsetting a “sugar hit” for your conscience? Yes.
Do some companies use carbon offsetting as an excuse to carry on polluting as normal but pay some money to say they’re good guys? Yes.
Carbon offsets are actually quite complex. If you pay some money to offset a flight, for example, it won’t go directly to planting some trees, it’s not straightforward.
But does it help?
In my opinion, yes, it helps, and we should all be offsetting – not just for flights but for our daily energy usage and consumption.
Why?
Because you’re routing money to buy good things, such as low-carbon stoves, tree-planting, solar energy around the world.
You’re not “offsetting” your emissions, but you are encouraging global decarbonization. It’s better for people to have solar energy than to continue to rely on fossil fuels, for example. You’re encouraging the good stuff.
Governments all around the world are failing to decarbonize. Most companies fail too – despite what they might try to tell you about how great they are (they’re not).
So, as usual, it falls to you and me to try our best to make a difference.
So yes, DO buy carbon offsets, for flights and for your daily consumption. It’s the right thing to do.
Next : Top 3 Tips to get the MOST from your carbon offsets
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Related : What’s the Problem with Flying?
Editor’s Note: This article has been updated with new information since it was originally published
Well said, buying carbon offsets are not the only solution. Many people want to offset thier carbon footprint but are unaware of how to do so.
I wonder how much weeds compare to planting trees. I was just on a long trip, and I was amazed at how the noxious weeds are proliferating everywhere. They are much bigger than the native weeds, so wouldn’t it be possible that they are having a greater effect too? Obviously they aren’t wanted. But they are spreading at a rapid rate. Maybe this is the positive side of noxious weeds.
Very good explanation of Carbon Offsets, especially for people like me that haven’t really head of them before.
Clare, I do believe in being a good steward of the environment but I do have to share with you that I am very skeptical about some of these programs and even the level of some of the information that comes out being tainted or slanted to produce certain results. What would you say to someone who is skeptical like me about some of these programs or even the information out there when it comes to the environment being exaggerated so that self-serving needs are met?
Last week one of the 2004 studies was questioned and one of the authors put on leave for fabricating parts of the information about polar bears drowning that has led to some laws that were enacted here in the United States. The reason that I bring this up is that it makes me question is all of this Global Warming information just hype as a way to make people feel guilty for what they do or is it real. If it is real how do we look at the real information instead of the Universities that are paid to write what they find. The issue is that when a school or a program is given money to perform a study it only makes sense to write the documentation in a way so that they group gets money on the next go round meaning they have to find and verify what was determined previously in the first place.
Clare thanks for reading and answering my long questions.
Scott Sylvan Bell
Scott, this is a long answer, but your question is very valid, and deserves a thorough answer.
First, thank you Scott so much for your comments and for taking the time to make them. I am very happy that you are sceptical – you should be! I am a firm believer in scepticism. Particularly now, because thanks to the internet, we have more ‘information’ at our fingertips than ever before. And, let’s be honest, there’s an awful lot of rubbish out there. So we all need to treat what we read with a large dose of scepticism.
I think if I had to sum up the main problem in one word, it would be “emotion”. In my opinion, there is far too much emotion in the whole environmental debate. If you read any of the comments sparked by Mark Joyner on Facebook (he asked if people understood climate change and if they had strong views) you’d know just how much emotion is involved. People got spitting mad – even Joyner said he’d learnt a lot about how people put down opposing points of view.
Having said that, there’s a lot of emotion in many other areas too – politics, the economy……. everyone has a view, and often it is a dogmatic one.
To get to the specific you mentioned – polar bear studies which are now shown to be misleading that caused legal changes. Throughout the ages, statistics have been made to prove whatever we want them to prove. Most people are pretty adept at highlighting certain aspects over others. Should it happen in more academic reports? Of course not. Does it happen? Yes – for exactly the reasons you mentioned.
Do I think that polar bears should not be protected because some of the evidence was faulty? No. I personally think they should still be protected – because protecting their habitat protects part of the environment – we have very few pristine wildernesses and I believe those areas are worth preserving rather than being exploited for resources.
It’s probably fair to say that when there’s money involved, there’s often going to be bias. Look at studies done on ingredients which were ‘proved’ to be ‘safe’ and were subsequently shown to be anything but.
Is GM food safe? The companies who produce it, say it is. Others disagree. Personally, I also treat the studies with some scepticism. I also know that with increasing population there are more mouths to feed and less land available for agriculture, thus we need more productivity per acre if we want to provide. I believe we need more research into long-term health effects – but we can’t get that if anti-GM folk burn fields. I do believe that GM food should be labelled as such, so that the end consumer can make an informed decision. And I also believe that if you live in extreme poverty, you don’t give a damn if that corn is GM or not – it’s food.
But I digress. I agree with you, studies can be – and are – misleading. Is there climate change or is it a load of self-serving baloney to get people to feel guilty? The earth is a very complex environment, with everything inter-related. I have seen as much argument for climate change as I have seen against it. What gets me very upset, though, is when people say “oh, climate change is a load of baloney” and then feel they don’t need to take responsibility for their actions. To me, that is a non sequitur or logical fallacy – there is no connection between the conclusion and its premise.
Here’s my viewpoint on the whole environmental thing. I believe we live on a planet with finite resources. The human race is clever and adaptable, which has meant we have taken advantage of our surroundings to create a more pleasant life for us. Because everything is inter-related (the inter-dependency of the food chain, for example, is truly wonderful to study), whatever we do has an effect somewhere. Is it a bad effect? Sometimes. Volcanoes, tsunamis, solar changes have effects too.
I believe that we humans as a race have lost touch with the environment. Native American Indians, African tribes, seemed to know instinctively when to hunt – and when to allow animals and fish to breed. They weren’t ‘environmentalists’ – they were simply using observation and common sense to ensure their food supply in future. Now, we demand a huge variety of fish, and fishermen risk their lives to bring it to us – together with all the other stuff that gets caught too – and much of it is wasted in restaurants and supermarkets.
Our products contain artificial ingredients, because they are cheap to produce – and we as consumers have demanded these low prices. Is there a link between the chemicals we’re using and exposed to each day, and our diseases? It’s unlikely to be truly good for our health.
London had its ‘pea-soup’ fogs after the industrial revolution caused by burning coal; many Chinese cities live in a blanket of apparent smog – I don’t think we can blame too much else other than our industrial processes and vehicles for this. We can trust our own judgement to know that we are going too far down the pollution road.
I try to operate on a principle of “do no harm”. I have greatly simplified my life, but I can always do more. Whatever I do / buy / use will have some impact – but by being aware of my choices, I can try to minimise that impact. I need to fly occasionally – if the only things protecting us from the vacuum of space are gravity and the atmosphere, then hundreds of planes every day can’t be helping to protect our environment. So I’ll offset in a way that makes sense to me.
Essentially, what I’m promoting in my blogs is a greater awareness of the choices we all make every day. Ideally, those choices will be win-win solutions – saving fuel for example. Of course, it takes a number of people to make these changes in order to make a significant difference – but how many people think ‘my little bit of litter won’t make any difference’?
I won’t change the world (despite believing when I left university that I was going to!), but I try to make a small difference. Maintain your scepticism Scott, it’s necessary! And rely on your common sense to work out whether we’re doing harm or not.
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