Carbon offsetting is a scheme that allows you to cancel out your personal greenhouse gas emissions by paying someone else to reduce their own emissions. It’s like an inverted bank account. If driving my car 1,000 kilometres puts a tonne of carbon dioxide into the air, for instance, I can neutralize the damage by paying someone to plant enough trees to draw a tonne of CO2 back out of the atmosphere.
Since the Earth has a single atmosphere, it doesn’t matter whether the trees are planted in New Germany, New Mexico or New Guinea. It doesn’t even matter whether the transaction involves the same greenhouse gases. Methane is 23 times more damaging than CO2, for instance, so one tonne of methane reduction is as good as 23 tonnes of CO2 reduction.
carbon trading
