Pay more, pollute more? The problem with carbon off-sets

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Nov. 20, 2009

Carbon offsets, a growing multi-billion dollar global industry, is a simple premise with an altruistic motivation: purchasing a carbon offset to cancel out the emissions generated by activities like flying or driving, and direct that money to programs that reduce emissions elsewhere. The developing problem is that carbon offsets are discouraging pollution but rather assuaging the guilt of the polluters. Travel company Responsible Travel just cancelled its carbon offset program because while it might help customers feel virtuous it wasn’t doing anything to reduce greenhouse gas emissions. Is this a fundamental problem with cap-and-trade, carbon offset strategy?

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Also on this episode

Guests:

Justin Francis, CEO of Responsible Travel, which promotes travel that respects and benefits local people and the environment.
CALL HIM:

Robert Stavins, professor of business & government at Harvard’s John F. Kennedy School of Government; director of the Harvard University Environmental Economics Program

michael from Orange
3 months, 3 weeks ago

The carbon offset is simply a shell game. We are fooling ourselves if we think this is really going to reduce global warming. We really need to actually reduce the the output of high carbon emissions industries that use coal as their energy input as costly as this may be the industrialized and developing world. Such industries as steel and electric power system need to move to cleaner forms of energy input. The offset system is really a mediocure step in that direction promoted by such industies as the coal industry.

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