My eyes glaze over whenever I hear "carbon neutral" or "carbon offset".

I'm skeptical.

The idea is that you pay an extra tax that is used to purchase a "carbon offset", which really isn't any particular thing. It's an idea - the idea being that your payment goes toward an undefined project, which one day could help the environment.

There are no standards in place. You are not actually reducing your "carbon footprint", literally. Big companies say things like, "We're running a carbon-neutral project" and they get to stamp lots of happy-faces all over their paperwork.

Yesterday I learned that carbon probably doesn't even heat up the planet. It's only correlated with global-warming, and correlation does not equal causation. The biggest thing that causes greenhouse effects is water vapour. Go figure. Water.

Also, the globe isn't heating up all that much.

"The only temperature data we can trust are satellite measurements, and they only go back to 1979. They show no warming in the southern hemisphere, and the warming trend in the northern hemisphere appears to have waned since 2001." link

Finally, only rich people in rich countries (like ours) can afford carbon offsets. Forcing developing countries to pay an extra tax hurts the people who live there. Think about it. When we were developing and growing, we NEVER had to pay a tax to the environment.

But we're asking China and India to do just that.