Making Reparation: Offset Your Life - Stolen Future, Broken Present: The Human Significance of Climate Change - page 147

thus begin to make good on our choice to take responsibility for the eco-
logical disaster now unfolding around us.
One problem with offsets, however, is that they are so cheap and so
easy to purchase that they may become too convenient. If one can afford
that minimal cost, why not simply continue flying as much as one pleases
and ofset it all? Such a strategy is certainly beter than lying without off-
sets; at least it helps cancel out the harm of one's travel. But the purpose
of offsets is to compensate for those emissions we cannot eliminate, not
to enable us to travel as much as we might wish. Otherwise, it becomes
a tactic to allow people to live in continued extravagance, as if they
can do all the harm they please as long as they buy the sense that they
are doing none.
Offsets are limited in this way because our eventual goal is both to
reduce emissions we might cause and help reduce emissions elsewhere ,
for a total reduction much larger than offsets can make possible. While
it does much good to fund projects that decrease environmental harm,
our eventual purpose is to do so while also reducing the harm to which
we directly contribute. Our eventual goal, then, must be to eliminate all
of our contributions to climate change while also enabling those in other
regions of the world to do the same.
These considerations inspire some people to deplore offsets entirely. If
we can potentially abuse them to excuse doing harm to the biosphere, the
logic goes, then we should avoid them altogether. But those who make
this point almost inevitably still travel by air; the virtue they espouse by
excluding offsets is thus illusory. The only responsible way to avoid using
them is to eliminate one's carbon footprint in the first place.
Nevertheless, we should take this hesitation to rely on offsets seri-
ously. Ultimately, offsets will be of value to us only if we see them as tools
to help us as we construct new practices that will do no direct harm. If
we decide to use offsets, we must commit ourselves to doing so sparingly
over the course of a transition in our actions— so that eventually we would
reduce our air travel so much we would no longer need those offsets at all .
Thinking of offsets as a transitional strategy may be our best option.
This is only one example of how we might shift our habits in the era
of climate change. How well does it represent a transformation in all our
activities? How can we build on it to rethink the whole patern?