# Do you offset your personal carbon emissions? **URL:** \ **Category:** In My Humble Opinion\ **Created:** [August 5, 2021, 5:31pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/do-you-offset-your-personal-carbon-emissions/948112 "2021-08-05T17:31:50Z")\ **Posts on this page:** 1\ **Showing post:** 13
**Author:** ![Delayed\_Reflex](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/delayed_reflex/32/3172_2.png) [@Delayed\_Reflex](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Delayed_Reflex)\ **Post date:** [August 9, 2021, 6:12pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/do-you-offset-your-personal-carbon-emissions/948112/13 "2021-08-09T18:12:51Z")
> [@wguy123](#): > > Our power company allows you to offset some or all of the carbon emissions associated with our power usage and we’ve enrolled there. We also contribute by walking and biking to work and for most errands. Our one car travels about 8000 miles/year. > > We do typically fly for one vacation per year and I hadn’t considered that, but will now. Thanks. 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. > [@Somethingwitty1](#): > > think acting as individuals, reducing our carbon footprint is a good idea. And if everybody did so, it would have an impact. > > But “offsets” seem to me a first world justification for our energy hogging lifestyle. Some might mentioned various circumstances they pay for carbon offsets like an airplane trip or your power company. Nothing wrong with that. > > But really, are we offsetting any significant amount? The strawberries you buy in the organic grocery store were flown in from South America. Shrimp farms in Asia are ecological disasters. Every store we go into is air conditioned. Our single family house. The suburban roads we drive on to go buy the organic strawberries. > > Huge corporations are responsible for the worst carbon pollution. But we facilitate it. Just carbon offsetting your trip to Hawaii doesn’t let you off the hook for the 1000s of other things first world people do every day. 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. > [@anny\_m](#): > > f someone is going to give a set amount of money for environmental issues, is it better to try to offset their own carbon footprint or to give to a nonprofit dedicated to environmental defense? 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](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/climeworks-would-you-buy-their-carbon-offsets/847030/9?) 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](https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/how-to-set-a-price-on-carbon-pollution/) 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. > [@Wesley\_Clark](#): > > my electric company has an option where for a trivial amount of money you can option to have your energy come from renewable sources. > > I assume this means when they buy 100MW or so of energy, they pool the money they got from customers to purchase renewables. > > However it was my understanding that renewable energy was cheaper than fossil fuel energy at this point in a lot of the US. But again, its a trivial amount of money, like \<$1 per $100 in electric bills. > > They should just mandate renewables rather than asking people to opt in for trivial amounts of money. 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! --- _[View the full topic](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/do-you-offset-your-personal-carbon-emissions/948112)._