Offset Your Life for Cheap
My body is a machine that converts oxygen into carbon dioxide. My lifestyle is a machine that converts oil and natural gas into even more of it. This is not good. While I try to reduce my carbon footprint as much as possible, there’s always something in me that reminds me that I am, at my baseline, a net loss to the planet. I could live in a cave, eating nuts and berries, and even then I would still be breathing – and I’m not going to live in a cave. I’m scared it would be cold. More importantly, I’m a pragmatist, and ideologies that tell people to live in caves tend to do poorly at the ballot box. I need another option.
At first glance, this seems like a reasonable worry to have. At second glance, it’s absurd. The concept of a “climate footprint” is a big-oil marketing tool to shift guilt from the corporations that are the real drivers of environmental degradation onto individuals who don’t have the luxury to refuse to participate in a gas-powered society. However, even knowing this to be true, I still want to make sure that I, myself, am not contributing in my own small way. Just because someone else is causing a problem doesn’t mean I’m not making it worse.
Here’s the thing, though: while climate change numbers are huge, if those numbers are largely the fault of specific firms and not individuals, any given individual’s numbers should be relatively low. US emissions per capita, which we can use as a solid upper bound on the average US inhabitant’s actual carbon footprint, are about fifteen tons, as of the early 2020s. To be clear, this is way too high. But it’s not actually all that much for any given individual. If you compressed it into solid form and put it into bags, one person could load that much onto the back of a truck in a day. The point is, at this scale, I might not be able to do much about anyone else’s emissions, but I can probably do something about mine.
Carbon offsets are controversial, and for good reason. It’s a very easy industry to scam people in. It’s also a very easy place to overpromise and underdeliver. Most of all, it’s easy to treat them as a “license to pollute”, and, when used by companies that really should decarbonize their own operations first, they can be. In the individual case, though, I believe that all of these problems can be overcome. The first two boil down to picking a reputable provider and then buying somewhat more credits than you otherwise would. Personally, I use Gold Standard, and, when I did my calculations and determined that I did come in around the fifteen-ton average (largely due to a couple of transatlantic flights), I multiplied that by four and offset sixty tons instead. That factor was based solely on vibes, and, if people have better calculations, I’m all ears.
The license to pollute issue is a little thornier. In my mind, it comes back to the fact that I can never be completely zero-carbon. I will always produce some waste. At the same time, as part of the process of living that produces that waste, I will also produce surplus value, which we usually think of in terms of income. If I didn’t exist, the waste would not be produced, but neither would the surplus value, and, when you run the numbers, it turns out that the surplus value is more than enough to offset the waste. My sixty tons cost me $600. I’m well aware that that’s an amount of money that many people don’t have, but I do happen to have it, and, by spending it, I can represent, overall, a trade-off that the planet is happy to make.
Now: is this enough? No. As a species, we can’t offset our way out of the problem. Is this unhelpful to people who don’t have $600, and is it a way of thinking that could be weaponized to deny them self-worth? Yes. All I can say is don’t do that. Can this replace reducing our own emissions? Not at all. But, in the very special case of one individual living in a society that isn’t going to change much either way based on their actions, carbon offsets are a surprisingly easy and somewhat affordable means of transforming oneself from a straight-up burden on the atmosphere to someoneone whose eventual climate legacy will be, at least, a lot more complicated than that.