GP already provided some "devil-in-the-details" line items to poke holes at carbon offsets (e.g. are all types of emissions being considered correctly)

The parallel that I'm drawing is that recycling was largely touted in the 90s as the solution to the world's pollution problems, but what ended up happening is that people's impression of recycling and their actual implementations turned out to be woefully out of sync. One can argue that the long term damage of this discrepancy is that people will mindlessly buy plastic bottles of coke, ultimately contributing to the microplastics problem because they've been largely trained to think that recycling plastics works (instead of a hypothetical alternative reality where people might instead bring reusable containers to stores to buy things).

> recycling was largely touted in the 90s as the solution to the world's pollution problems

On the contrary that's not how i remember it - everyone was talking about how recycling was the worst out of reduce, reuse, recycle.

However people want to clear their concious for free, so they chose recycling above all else.

> everyone was talking about how recycling was the worst

Curious to hear some of these examples.

If you look at Japan, for example, they obsessively went all in on recycling. Look at how many different types of recyclables they have, the new electronics craze, the apartment complex obasans that would bring your unsorted garbage back to your unit door as a form of passive-aggressive social peer pressure, etc.

I distinctly remember being taught about recycling in school, and reading about it in children's books, but reduce and reuse were at best afterthoughts, if mentioned at all.

Governments spend a considerable amount on recycling education (e.g. pamphlets about what can and cannot go in a recycling bin), but the taxation incentives I'm aware of don't really paint a super convincing reduce/reuse-oriented strategy.

Granted, I was just a child in the 90s, but I remember all the messaging on TV from cartoons and movies was "recycle, recycle, recycle". I didn't hear anything about"reduce" and "reuse" until I read about it on the internet a few years ago. There were some mentions about making sure not to waste resources, but it wasn't a named thing like recycle was.

As a child in the late 80s it was the three r's. Then the bluebox program became the focus.

I think it is that Google says its carbon footprint is "zero", just like folks who maybe recycle 100% of everything they buy from the store, but in reality much of that isn't actually recyclable even if it has the logo on it. Thus this statement should likely be taken with a grain of salt.