Question Earthority!

It seems like every week, the transition of environmental activism to a market paradigm takes another step forward. As recently as a couple of months ago, “personal carbon offsets” seemed like a thing of the future. Now I can’t swing a cat without hitting a company offering them.

It’s been going on for awhile at the “rockstar” level: As far back as 2003, rock group Pearl Jam ran a “carbon-neutral” tour. Now, musician Kelly Stoltz is offsetting the pollution costs of his new album. Companies are now in the business of letting consumers know which companies offset their environmental impacts.

In the last few months, however, it’s started to get truly personal in a visible way. Right offhand (or, rather, right off of some ads in the sidebar of a Google search), the Solar Electric Light Fund and Carbonfund offer what amount to “total personal” offset packages, and myclimate offers offsets for travelers on a per-trip basis. There’s even a directory of offset providers.

Of course, this can be a bit overblown. Just because you “offset” your own pollution, that doesn’t mean everyone else will — and “personal” pollution apparently constitutes only about 25% of greenhouse emissions. Right now, the “demand” seems to be primarily from people who want to feel good about what they’re doing, and the “supply” seems to be a product that consists of nothing more than the knowledge that the customer isn’t a net polluter.

But it’s a start. In the end, no amount of coercion will clean up the environment unless people really want it cleaned up badly enough to pay the price. Over time, perhaps these “offsets” will become popular enough to have an effect … and to cause consumers to dicker down the prices of their cars and such by some amount resembling the price they’ll be paying for those “offsets,” until the makers of those products decide to make things that don’t pollute so much in the first place.

I’m going to be investigating the “offset” offerings, with a view toward participating myself, and talking to ISIL about making Question Earthority! “carbon neutral.”