Nothing you do to offset your individual impacts matters. At all. It's just greenwashing, not even a rounding error. Even if you stopped producing carbon completely, or just outright died, some other first-worlder is having a baby or two right this moment and they will eclipse your carbon output in no time. There are already a bazillion offsets floating around and their sum total is still not making any meaningful impact on climate change.
The only chance you have at making any sort of real difference is affecting large-scale change, whether that's by empowering certain ideologies through politics, creating new technologies or markets, etc. The Patagonia guy recently made the news for turning his entire clothing chain into a fundraiser for climate change, for example. But all of those are long shots and probably all of them combined still won't be enough to make a noticeable dent in our lifetimes... it's a pretty doomed effort by this point, just too little, too late.
There is a tiny, tiny chance that some major bet with terrible odds (in fusion, say, or a super-climate-conscious politician or whatever) miiiiiiight pay off to make some small difference, and by that I mean postponing climate effects by a few years, not avoiding it altogether. That tiny, tiny chance is still more of a difference than what you'd make if you focused on your own life. Don't waste your time or money trying to make yourself feel good.
This is not the sort of problem that individual incrementalism can solve, sadly.
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Nothing you do to offset your individual impacts matters. At all. It's just greenwashing, not even a rounding error. Even if you stopped producing carbon completely, or just outright died, some other first-worlder is having a baby or two right this moment and they will eclipse your carbon output in no time. There are already a bazillion offsets floating around and their sum total is still not making any meaningful impact on climate change.
The only chance you have at making any sort of real difference is affecting large-scale change, whether that's by empowering certain ideologies through politics, creating new technologies or markets, etc. The Patagonia guy recently made the news for turning his entire clothing chain into a fundraiser for climate change, for example. But all of those are long shots and probably all of them combined still won't be enough to make a noticeable dent in our lifetimes... it's a pretty doomed effort by this point, just too little, too late.
There is a tiny, tiny chance that some major bet with terrible odds (in fusion, say, or a super-climate-conscious politician or whatever) miiiiiiight pay off to make some small difference, and by that I mean postponing climate effects by a few years, not avoiding it altogether. That tiny, tiny chance is still more of a difference than what you'd make if you focused on your own life. Don't waste your time or money trying to make yourself feel good.
This is not the sort of problem that individual incrementalism can solve, sadly.