A few times now I've heard the meme comparing carbon offset credits to Catholic indulgences - where one can \"buy one's way out of punishment\". I think this argument is completely bogus and that the similarities are superficial at best.<\/p>\n
Carbon offsetting is an economic solution to an economic problem. Many people want to live a more green life but don't want to change their habits to do so - many of the things that they want to buy or do (like air travel) don't have (more expensive) carbon-neutral equivalents. Perhaps such equivalents are possible but the demand isn't sufficient yet for them to be practical. But just like the invention of money made trades possible that were impractical with the barter system, carbon credits make it possible for some people to be carbon neutral without everybody having to be so at once.<\/p>\n
The key here is that the aim of the exercise is to reduce the total amount of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere. Doing something which adds CO2<\/sub> and something else which removes it is just as good as doing neither.<\/p>\n Sin, forgiveness and punishment don't work like that, though - doing one good deed doesn't (and shouldn't) make up for an unrelated sin of equivalent value, because (unlike CO2<\/sub>) the total amount of sin isn't a meaningful concept - everyone just cares about the sins that are made against them in particular.<\/p>\n Also, Carbon credits can have a measurable effect whereas it's impossible to be sure just how long you're going to spend in purgatory. So fraud is more difficult (though still possible - we do need to have some way of ensuring that the money spent on Carbon credits is actually being spent on what it is being purported to instead of being squandered and that that activity is having the desired effect).<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" A few times now I've heard the meme comparing carbon offset credits to Catholic indulgences - where one can \"buy one's way out of punishment\". I think this argument is completely bogus and that the similarities are superficial at best. Carbon offsetting is an economic solution to an economic problem. Many people want to live […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[32],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-529","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-economics"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.reenigne.org\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/529","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.reenigne.org\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.reenigne.org\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.reenigne.org\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.reenigne.org\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=529"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.reenigne.org\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/529\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.reenigne.org\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=529"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.reenigne.org\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=529"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.reenigne.org\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=529"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}