Climate ethicists flying to conferences? The middle ground regarding voluntarily offsetting emissions

Voluntary offsetting allows you to ‘neutralise’ your carbon dioxide emissions by preventing the same amount of carbon dioxide from being emitted by someone else, most often somewhere else. Offsetting is a very polarised issue: some defend it as an effective way for individuals to neutralise their carbon emissions, while others have fiercely opposed it as a morally dubious practice

In this post, I take a position in the middle: I believe that under some conditions, emitting-and-offsetting should be morally acceptable. Briefly, these conditions are: 

1. Select an independent, non-profit organisation to offset your emissions
2. Select an organisation that is transparent about how your money is put to use and how the offsetting occurs in practice
3. Select a project that has been verified by a certification organisation: to make it easier for you to determine whether offsetting projects satisfy the more technical requirements (such as additionality), some independent projects on their effective emission  reduction, among other criteria. For example, the Gold Standard is awarded to projects that effectively contribute to protecting the climate as well as to at least three additional Sustainable Development Goals
4. Select projects in the developing world, with direct additional benefits for the communities involved
5. Pay a fair price for your offsetting
6. Do not offset lightly: offsetting remains a second-best solution, for emissions that are non-trivial and unavoidable. This at least requires you to critically reflect upon and justify the activities through which you emit the greenhouse gases to be offset.
7. Offsetting should not lead to complacency: it does not fulfil other duties of global justice (including other duties related to tackling climate change)

On the basis of these conditions, I can recommend the following organisations to offset your emissions: 

• MyClimate
• Atmosfair
• ClimateCare

I explain the reasoning behind the conditions into some more detail in the original Blog Post for Justice Everywhere. However, I feel that this already long post does not yet sufficiently explain my position, so I am thinking about writing a full paper about this. I'll keep you posted!