As easy as offsetting?

I received a leaflet the other day from one of the big adventure travel companies trying to tempt me onto one of their exotic family adventure holidays. It looked and sounded great. If I'd had the time and money I'd have booked. What's more the literature said I could do in in style, go eco-friendly, low impact and carbon neutral by offsetting the carbon emissions from my long haul flight by by purchasing carbon offsets on the web from climate care.

So I looked them up and it all looks a great idea. With a few clicks I calculated I could ease my conscience for flying a family of five to South Africa for just £108.83. Not bad value for getting rid of 14.51 tonnes of CO2. Clicking a little further I found I could offset an average households car and home fuel emissions of 9.63 tonnes CO2 for a further £60.02, payable on the spot by credit card. In less than five minutes and for less than £200 I could have wiped out my annual carbon debt. Or so it seemed.

If only it were that easy. But it's clearly not the case. I'm sure climate care are a worthy organisation, doing their bit to help save the planet but it seems to me the only thing purchasing an offset is really going to reduce is my bank balance. Handing over my money is not going to make my emissions go away. If anything, it might make it all seem so easy, cheap and guilt free I might be tempted to make a few more. And even if my money is wisely invested in carbon sinks or some other technological wonder for carbon storage (as no doubt some of it would be), surely it's only storing up the problem for another day, when the trees decay and release my emissions back into the atmosphere creating a problem for my kids generation or beyond. Carbon offsetting may ease my concsience a little but it doesn't address the real problem of consumption. At best it just defers it, at worst it encourages us to carry on with business as usual.

So it's no thanks to that safari in South Africa and no thanks to climate care (but carrying on doing your good work). The real work is not offsetting emissions but not making them in the first place.