Cheatneutral is a great thought provoking website with a terrific video.
However trading cheating is not quite the same as trading carbon emissions. I’m no expert on this, but I thought carbon offsetting is rather like two friends that both heat their homes using oil fired central heating. They both agree they want to cut their emissions but one of them has little choice of low carbon heating options: there sun and wind are both unreliable, the only option is to insulate and there still needs to be some heating. The other friend lives in a location with plentiful wind and sun, but they are expensive to install. The friends want to do something, so they agree to split the cost of the convertion to solar and wind power at the house where this is viable.
This is better than doing nothing. In the case of cheatneutral, paying a fine is not better than doing nothing. Over all, isn’t cutting some carbon output, better than none, or is it simply hiding the fact that we’ve got a lot still to cut?
(With my yours2share hat on, I can see that sharing the cost of the solar and wind power convertion is practically not a good idea – and sharing anything with friends is fraught with difficulties, but that’s another story.)
Hilarious! I went straight to the website and it was only after reading a few of the pages with my mouth dropped onto the desk before I realised it was a spoof… however your 2 friends analogy sounds like rather a positive spin on carbon offsetting, I thought the reality was more like my colleagues in Ghana getting grants to not chop down their trees or not install air-con (they don’t wish to do either but they are very happy to get paid for not doing it). Great blog.
It’s good isn’t it! No my example wasn’t that great, but I can see why carbon offsetting could work in some cases, it can also be abused and doesn’t cure the main problem.