Do It Yourself Carbon Offsets

When I first heard of carbon offsets, I loved the idea: a very committed, thoughtful person used them to reduce her guilt about the impacts she couldn't change. Since then they've been drifting into the old paradigms that got us into this mess, "Carbon Indulgences" letting us sin. Even at their best, they work like this: a windmill farm creates some electricity. They sell the electricity to someone who says, yeah! I'm using wind power! They sell carbon credits to someone else who decides that they can now "offset" that flight. Meanwhile the activists who push for new laws, and in some cases the engineers pushing ahead of the market, are creating much of the driving force for change and are often deeply underfunded. And at the end of the day, you still burned fuel to fly, and the windmills are producing more energy but not really keeping the existing oil in the ground. You're not really offsetting the oil, just producing more electricity.

To my mind it's all about the attitude: when I first heard of carbon credits, they were a way to carefully examine your life and restore some of the damage you did -- but they also acted as a measure of the damage to make you more conscious, not more consumerist. Now carbon credits are making us less in charge again, when it would be so simple to fix that.

I'm recommending "Do It Yourself" carbon credits. Don't fund a compact flourescent through a carbon offsetter to a nonprofit to a stranger, walk over to your neighbors and knock on the door...

Add your ideas, I'd love a co-creator to help make this big!

* Walk over to your neighbor's house with a compact florescent (and a ladder?) and offer to install it.
* Community garden days. Less watered lawns, more trees and gardens.
* Tell your neighbors when you go shopping if you drive, and see if they want to go with you.
* I especially like combining community, ideas and actions: start a rotating movie night, where everyone shows up for an environmental (or your favorite cause) video to watch and discuss, followed by two hours of greening: a mini-barn-raising to plant a garden, install insulation or low-flow plumbing.