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30 Inspirational Quotes About carbon footprint calculator

Doesn’t air travel have a massive carbon footprint? Carbon offsets sound great: You can do whatever you want, and just cancel out the carbon impact by buying something! A carbon offset is essentially an investment in a climate change mitigating project. But that can mean many different things. You could be buying a tree! Or, more likely, a piece of a tree! You could be buying a small portion of a solar project! You could be buying energy alternatives for developing countries! So what would I be buying for my flight to Tokyo? Well, let’s see here.

So it looks like you'll be sending money to help light a flame that burns methane coming off of a garbage dump in New Brunswick, Canada. It still produces carbon dioxide, but it's not as bad for the climate as the methane. So let me get this straight: I’m paying to make the toxic gas emanating from a literal trash fire slightly less bad? Yeah, pretty much. Turns out there’s a huge range of things that can qualify as a carbon offset. And in North America, about 40% are basically versions of that garbage fire. There are, of course, more appealing offsets that big-emitting corporations, like airlines, and oil companies can invest in, particularly under cap-and-trade systems, like the one in California.

And those can have real impacts for real communities. For example, one native tribe in northeastern Washington manages a large forest on their reservation to suck up extra carbon in exchange for 11 million metric tons of carbon offsets in the California cap-and-trade program. They sold those to BP, which covered some of its emissions in the state. A lot of that money from BP is going into a sort of "climate insurance fund" for the tribe, in case of wildfire or other disaster. Overall, California’s cap-and-trade scheme has meaningfully reduced the state’s emissions, according to one analysis. But what about the communities that actually live around the BP plants in California ? And breathe all their toxic emissions? When California’s cap-and-trade policy started, 75 percent of offsets purchased by companies polluting in California went to projects out-of-state. "Place does matter. So this https://meridiandlt.com whole notion that a ton of CO2 saved in one place is just as good as a ton of CO2 saved in another, especially when you're adding in additional co-pollutants, offsets don't make sense." Offsets are not the only tools we should use to address climate change.

It’s hard to say if they’re even very effective on a large scale, because it’s hard to measure their impact. "You're not just measuring emissions, you're estimating emissions reductions. It's really hard to know what would've happened had we not made this payment." And carbon offsets are often the cheapest ways to reduce emissions, meaning we’re putting off the hard stuff, like electrifying our vehicle fleet, and making our economy more efficient.

One Stanford study compared carbon offsets to ”the purchase of indulgences,” like A Catholic indulgence was basically a payment to the Church to forgive your sins. Probably not the most effective get-out-of-hell card, and not the best way to cut carbon, either. Ultimately, the most climate-friendly actions are just not emitting carbon, if you can. Which in my case would mean no trip to Japan.

But there are alternatives to offsets. "If you want your money to do something good for the climate, there are a number of things you can support. And it's not necessarily offsets. You could support an organization that's addressing climate change, or a project in your own community." So you’re saying I probably shouldn’t donate to the garbage fire? I’m just saying you have options. But you should probably do something.