Better Offsets

I’ve been recommended an alternative company for offsets – Climate Care. It certainly works very cleanly and efficiently and apppears to have an excellent rosta of projects that the money goes to.

The only oddity I still find is the ludicrously low price of carbon. I was forced to take a flight to Amsterdam last week and immediately wanted to assuage the guilt feelings by paying my offset – buying indulgences all over again. But I was then amazed to discover that the 0.11 tonnes I had consumed would only cost me 85p to offset.

In the first place it’s hard to believe that 85p would actually buy any carbon saving to speak of. And secondly, at this rate there’s no incentive to change. Who’s going to stop their Spanish holidays to avoid paying a few pounds extra? Indeed I needn’t have bothered with the year-long struggle to reduce our family carbon footprint by 28 tonnes. I could just have paid up £210 and forgotten all about it.

Something wrong here.