Likewise, I also try to minimize my personal carbon footprint in my day-to-day life by cycling to work/etc. when possible, and feel fortunate that my city has chosen to invest in bike lanes and other infrastructure to provide better options for non-car transportation. Still, I do gain a lot of enjoyment out of international travel, so I haven’t been willing to give that up completely, so I feel offsets hopefully at least help reduce the impact of that.
Yes, to a definite extent this is true - which is why I am a big proponent of high carbon pricing so that the carbon cost of those strawberries flow in from South America, your air conditioning, and fuel costs for driving is reflected in the up-front price of these things. If it turns out that with, say, a $180/tonne carbon price, local strawberries only go up a few cents but imported strawberries double in cost, there will be clear market signals about what specific things have really high carbon footprint based on their cost and people can adjust their lifestyles accordingly. I think we’ll have to manage things carefully to ensure that poor people aren’t completely devastated by high carbon pricing, but given that poor people generally have lower carbon footprints than rich people, something like a flat per-person carbon tax rebate (which we have in some provinces in Canada) would probably be a net benefit to poor people overall.
Huge corporations may be responsible for the most carbon emissions, but I don’t see how you can make them solely responsible for reducing the emissions without impacting the average person. Legislate them to reduce emissions will just result in them passing the costs on to consumers, so you’re paying for it one way or the other anyway.
This is a good question, but I don’t know if there’s a good answer to it. Is there any evidence out there on how effective ENGOs (environmental non-governmental organizations) are at influencing environmental policy, especially as pertains to climate change? In a past thread about one specific company providing offsets, a poster argued that you would get a lot more leverage out of your money donating to political causes, but I’d be curious if there was any research out there showing that.
In any case, offsets often seem quite cheap relative to what a lot of economists suggest the actual carbon price needs to be to mitigate the worst climate change scenarios (eg. this article suggested that $40 per ton rising by 5% per year could be enough to get the US on track to be carbon-free by 2050, but many other sites I’ve seen suggest prices in the hundreds of dollars per ton might be necessary) - but many offsets seem to be more in the $10/ton range (eg. Carbonfund that @WildaBeast mentioned, as well as many of the projects on the UNFCC site). That makes me wonder if there is still a lot of low-hanging fruit out there with respect to ways to reduce carbon emissions.
I think this kind of plays in to the “additionality” problem that was mentioned in the Vox article. Does the money that electricity providers collect for “voluntary renewables” actually result in them building new renewable power plants that wouldn’t have been economical otherwise, or does it just result in increased profits for them? Seems like if it only costs the company 1% more to build new renewable plants vs. fossil fuel plants they would be going with the renewable option anyway!