I've been posting about this a lot, but check out Project Wren! (https://projectwren.com/)

It costs me $40 a month to offset my own carbon footprint, but I take a lot more flights than the average person.

Great, didn't know about that. Subscribed on the spot and sharing it around, thanks for posting.

We need lots more people like you! :)

Do you know if their projects are audited by independent 3rd party?

The highest ClimeWorks plan, if it's trustworthy (can't personally vouch for it) is approx 1 USD per kg CO2 captured, or $1k per ton.

That's pretty expensive. But at $100 it starts to look a lot more favourable when compared with a personal footprint - 30 tons emitted would be $3K, perfectly achievable for someone who's talking about flying to go skiing.

It's a bit of a red flag that they sell their highest plan, 600kg a year, as "approx. 100% of a global average footprint". While that's probably true, the median human does not fly. A one way flight London->New York generates almost this much per passenger.

The mean emissions of those willing to spend 600 EUR/year to offset their travel are going to be at least an order of magnitude higher. You're better off feeling guilty and reducing your travel by 10% (in terms of personal emissions).

I do admit it's tricky, because if everybody is scared off by the true price tag (my lifetime emissions as an Australian would easily be $500k), the technology will never get a chance to get economy of scale and lower prices. That's really what you're paying for when you sign up for the plan.

Right. US per capita is ~16 tons, UK is ~7. So at least ten times that figure. Agree with the rest of your post.

Their pitch is offsetting travel emissions, not all emissions.

Terrapass seems to say my CO2 emissions from flying so far this year are going to come in around 13 metric tons.

At $1000 per ton this isn't feasible. At $100 I'd think about it. At $10 it's not a question that I'd buy it.

At $1000 per ton I'd change my air spending habits. At $100 per ton built into the price per flight I would probably take the same trips.

tl;dr: get this price down an order of magnitude and I'm in.

so, the average total carbon emission per person is 4.5 tons, and your flying alone is 13?

Isn't it better that you/we change your/our air spending habits? I don't believe that we can offset our carbon footprint fast enough with carbon sinks while still maintaing the same levels of carbon emission.

Reality of course is that if there is significant upfront economic costs then very few people are going to buy into the scheme, I think innovation is our best bet and if $100 per ton is a price point where people are in then that's probablly the best pragmatic choice.

However, needless transport seems a great target for emission reduction, we still need to get around, but "commuting" while emitting carbon would seem the easiest way to reduce carbon emissions, we have all the tech we need for that (public transport/remote work/online shopping/ride sharing/EVS/reduced work weeks) just no incentive to change.

If you add the cost of $100 per ton to the price of the plane ticket, you would see some amount of travel reduction naturally.

What travel reduction we would have would, at that point, pay for the appropriate sequestration.

Honestly, it sounds like we should just require everyone to buy 100% sequestration for their carbon production (priced into the goods and services). Add a phase in over, say 10 years to.

I'd like to see companies actually track how much CO2 goes into the production of their products. Imagine if everything you buy had the equivalent of an EnergyGuide sticker for CO2 emissions used in the production of that thing. It would lead to companies trying to optimise their products to reduce CO2 used in the manufacturing process.

Agree. This should be legislated just as calories are today. You could ratchet up the severity of the legislation slowly; initially you might allow estimates, over time you could start to audit the supply chain etc.

Some items do already expose this information, but it's pretty much all stuff for the eco market.

Though I remember Walkers' crisps doing this ten years back. 80g for a packet of crisps. Or about 3kg CO2 per 1kg crisps. Doesn't include final transportation though.

Yea, that makes sense, then gives you an easy path to charging a tax with revenues going to offsets or sequestration based on the number on the sticker.

The average in the US is about 16.

I agree that the correct solution is to just whack a carbon tax on flights.

It's ideal if people voluntarily reduce - I've committed myself to not flying except in case of family emergency - but ultimately that's not going to solve the problem because it's a tragedy of the commons.

Express it as an overhead on ticket price. You're using terrapass, so I plugged some numbers in and it out to about 20-30% based on what I can remember paying for typical domestic economy seats. If you fly on more expensive flights, it's even cheaper.

That sounds tolerable to me as a price of saving the planet. Certainly it's not an economy-busting impossibility given that it's in the range that can be reasonably borne by normal middle class individuals.

Yeah. The major problem I think comes about with stuff like Ryanair flights for ten quid where the carbon tax might well whack up the cost by orders of magnitude.

I think it's incorrect to categorise limiting flying as 'economy busting' in any sense to be frank - what percentage of flights are things like people visiting relatives?

It might be a bit of a shame, but economy busting is surely hyperbolic, it's primarily a leisure activity.

> Ryanair flights for ten quid where the carbon tax might well whack up the cost by orders of magnitude.

It would be nowhere near that amount. I used a flight estimator which says a return flight from London to Malaga would emit 0.3 tonnes of CO2.

Project Wren charges $10 - $20 per tonne, so it would cost the same as the ticket at most, even including the cut Ryanair inevitably would take. If you take a more normal ticket price, it would be an insignificant extra.

Mmm.

I'd like to think that at $100/ton, or probably before that, we just price it in to flights.

Sorry if I sound too negative but I think carbon offsetting is the very quintessence of what one would call green washing. There is no way around changing our life styles. If you don't want to feel bad about flying, take a train.