In the small hours of the morning, when I'm fantasising that I don't have to give up flying and dreaming of the back-packing days of my yoof, I love the idea that we can just solve climate change by sending up 100-square-km mirrors into space to reflect the hot sunlight back to the stars. Others have suggested creating a kind of outer-space sun-shade over the tropics using small particles, space ships, (or perhaps extra long fronds of bamboo woven together by fairtrade certified families in Uttar Pradesh?), or even asking extra-terrestrials if they have any suggestions which could help with our, you know, cooking-planet problem. And of course it's a relief to hear that the Department for Environment, Food and Rural Affairs (Defra) believes nanotechnology will ride to the rescue: when teeny-weeny mini-machines are saving our necks you know we're living in interesting times.
Somewhere in line with all these ideas, as far as fraying lifelines thrown from the Titanic go, is the idea of carbon offsetting. The climate camp protesters on Monday extended their list of personal irritants to include carbon offsetting companies and personally I'm with them.
Although I'm sure the people who work in this area are the kindest, most committed environmentalists possible, whenever I think of carbon offsetting I get a vision of a company AGM which has reached the Going Green item on the agenda. All the chocolate biscuits have gone, the note taking is starting to suffer, and they're sitting round going "Hmm, no, can't get rid of the company cars, can't force all workers to switch their computers off at night, never really been convinced by those tele-conferencing things so we'll have to carry on flying everyone in from New York... I know! We'll offset!"
And that's it.
Dear souls. This is what it is. Carbon offsetting is just wishful thinking. We are going to have to reduce our own carbon footprints. We will not be able to solve this problem by paying someone to trap pigs farts under plastic.
