Asklemmy

43945 readers

875 users here now

A loosely moderated place to ask open-ended questions

Search asklemmy 🔍

If your post meets the following criteria, it's welcome here!

Open-ended question
Not offensive: at this point, we do not have the bandwidth to moderate overtly political discussions. Assume best intent and be excellent to each other.
Not regarding using or support for Lemmy: context, see the list of support communities and tools for finding communities below
Not ad nauseam inducing: please make sure it is a question that would be new to most members
An actual topic of discussion

Looking for support?

Looking for a community?

Lemmyverse: community search
sub.rehab: maps old subreddits to fediverse options, marks official as such
!lemmy411@lemmy.ca: a community for finding communities

~Icon~ ~by~ ~@Double_A@discuss.tchncs.de~

founded 5 years ago

MODERATORS

Do any of you pay for carbon offsets? (lemmy.ca)

submitted 1 year ago by SkepticalButOpenMinded@lemmy.ca to c/asklemmy@lemmy.ml

53 comments fedilink hide all child comments

Of course, it's better to emit less carbon, and support systems and policies that emit less carbon. That said, carbon emission is unavoidable, and I'd like to minimize that portion of my impact as much as possible.

I am definitely willing to pay to offset my carbon usage, but I'm under the impression that this is mostly a scam. Does anyone use these services? If so, can you tell me what reasoning or sources you used that satisfied you that the service your chose isn't a scam?

you are viewing a single comment's thread
view the rest of the comments

[–] htrayl@lemmy.world 2 points 1 year ago

The level of zealous dogma in this thread is pretty sad. Carbon offsets are an enormous field - and definitely there are a lot of low effort scams - but simultaneously there are many opportunities for it to be an extremely valuable part of the climate response. We do need it to be highly regulated, and by itself it really isn't enough. But, for example, buying low value land that was never a real factor for climate change is not the same as, say burning biomass for biochar or removing refrigerants, or subsidizing renewable energy.

An alternative to direct carbon offsets is political contributions - you have an immense amount of power locally in particular. That can help drive more sustainable construction, cleaner transit, and renewable local generation.

Additionally, the claim that individual action is not important or valuable is also pretty pathetic and honestly just an excuse to not make any personal changes. The reality is systemic change follows personal change. Government needs a mandate to make important investments and regulations, but it cannot do it if people are completely unwilling to change their lifestyle.