Buying carbon offsets like planting trees always struck me as eerily similar to buying indulgences. You do a bad thing, then try to settle the score with a questionable purchase, so you can keep doing the bad thing. A tree planted today is not offsetting your flight tomorrow.
Same with offset programs like replacing third world cooking stoves. It’s all fine stuff, but you could also NOT fly AND buy the cooking stoves. This indulgence-based approach to living is 😬. Making your charity dependent on your transgressions...
I get the reason the market exists. People don’t want to think of themselves as part of the problem. Zizek has a great angle on this with the Starbucks example: Donate a few cents on a purchase to some charitable cause that deals with effects of capitalism while consuming!
Which leads to another Zizek point: It’s better to do nothing than to pretend to do something. When you do nothing, you’re forced to wrestle with the moral weight of that all the time. When you pretend to do something, you get to forget and live to deny.
The indulgence approach to climate change reminds me of turning lateness to pickup your child at daycare into a commodity. Once you price a sin, you effectually commoditize it, and remove it from the moral realm. thestar.com/life/health_we…
It's also inherently regressive. If you 10x the price of flying, only rich people get to fly. One better parallel for carbon taxation is income-proportionate speeding tickets, like Norway or Switzerland. Everyone gets a basic carbon budget, going over means proportionate tax.
