Martin Wright in the Green Room at the BBC:

Remember when carbon offsets were cool? When everyone from Coldplay to Fifa banged on about their carbon neutrality?

Now you can hardly mention them without incurring a great howl of derision. Almost overnight, offsets have slumped from being a dream solution to the mother of all futile gestures.

[...]

Most people out there aren’t champing at the bit to make revolutionary lifestyle changes, much as the activist might wish. But they’re more than happy to make some small payment in return for a dose of feel-good.

To them, it’s pretty unimportant whether or not this totally and utterly neutralises their carbon. They just want to do something useful.

[...]

There’s a need for rigour, sure, but it would be a shame if that came at the price of inspiration.

The sort of inspiration which comes from knowing that you’ve helped a woman in Nepal get a biogas cook-stove, freeing her from walking three hours a day to fetch firewood from dwindling forests, and then spending the rest of her waking hours in a kitchen filled with enough woodsmoke to give her and her kids chronic lung disease for life…Or from learning that you’ve helped install a simple treadle pump which allows poor Indian farmers to grow crops throughout the dry season – so avoiding the need to uproot their families, taking their kids out of school, in search of sporadic work as day-labourers on building sites in cities far from home.

These are the sort of projects, funded by small-scale, voluntary offsets, which can make a tangible difference both to carbon levels, and the quality of life of some of the world’s poorest people – none of whom give a damn whether they’ve precisely balanced your emissions or not.

Each of them are among the winners of an Ashden Award for Sustainable Energy, which focuses on schemes which simultaneously tackle climate change and poverty.

[...]

Meanwhile, it’s surely better to replace a single kerosene lamp with a solar light, than to sit there, principles intact, cursing the darkness.