In the middle ages, the catholic church sold “indulgences”, forgiveness for sins at a price. Today, carbon offset programs offer similar absolution for your global warming sins. Georgina Laidlaw over at Web Worker Daily makes an argument for the mobile worker to adopt the strategy to attain the modern nirvana of being carbon neutral:

It’s no surprise that working remotely can have benefits for your environmental footprint: Working offsite has knocked around 18,000 miles off my public transport usage from last year alone. But no matter how careful or responsible web workers might be, the reality is that first-world or “western” lifestyles and standards of living are inherently linked with resource consumption. You may be doing your bit, but you’re unlikely to be living a carbon-neutral life.

I, myself, am skeptical about the benefits of supporting the carbon offset industry, though I do appreciate the “early adopter parallel” argument (that the infant industry has major problems, but that by buying into it now, we ensure that it will be able to survive long enough to correct them and become mainstream). But its credibility took a big hit early, in 2007, when a Financial Times investigation revealed widespread carbon offset fraud. Laidlaw does briefly cover the controversy and advocates doing your own research, but she lives in Australia, who has a much better system for doing that than we do stateside.

Things are improving, of course. Recently, the Feds here in the U.S. indicated that they are going to begin regulating offsets to one degree or another, which is another step towards legitimacy. As is formal accreditation and defined processes such as those overseen by the Clean Development Mechanism of the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCCC).

Accreditation and government regulation will ultimately dictate whether offsets will ever PRACTICALLY be viable, but there is also the moral question of whether you should, again harkening back to the historical issue of paying off your own sins. I think it is reasonable for large corporations to do so. They are, after all, non-physical entities who already pay others to do everything for them. But we are not, for the most part, non-physical. You and I are almost certainly perfectly capable of volunteering to go and pick up garbage or plant trees or something ACTUAL, rather than hypothetical. Then you don’t have to wonder how much of your effort, represented by you carbon offset dollar is actually going to concrete efforts. You can just count how many new trees or bags of garbage are behind you.

The Arbor Day Foundation maintains a list of organizations nationwide with whom you can volunteer to plant trees. Google “volunteer garbage collection” plus your city for constant events near you.

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