Offset This?

All those proponents of carbon offsets as a cure to global warming might want to hold on to their money just a little longer. It's nothing more than a scam to part you from your money.

Companies and individuals rushing to go green have been spending millions on “carbon credit” projects that yield few if any environmental benefits.

A Financial Times investigation has uncovered widespread failings in the new markets for greenhouse gases, suggesting some organisations are paying for emissions reductions that do not take place.

Others are meanwhile making big profits from carbon trading for very small expenditure and in some cases for clean-ups that they would have made anyway.

The growing political salience of environmental politics has sparked a “green gold rush”, which has seen a dramatic expansion in the number of businesses offering both companies and individuals the chance to go “carbon neutral”, offsetting their own energy use by buying carbon credits that cancel out their contribution to global warming.

You may be purchasing carbon offsets with the idea that you're saving the environment, but all you're doing is padding the bottom line of some energy companies that are already making a hefty profit on what they were already doing.

You'd be much more successful in cleaning up the environment and reducing emissions by taking real steps to reduce energy consumption - switching to CFLs or driving less or purchasing/using cars that are more gas efficient. Dropping opposition to cleaner energy production systems, like nuclear, wind, solar, and tidal would be a major help. Of course, you get a combination of NIBMYiots who think that these projects are fine just as long as they're located somewhere else, but that ignores the fact that power generation is most efficient when it located nearest to the end users.

UPDATE:
In a move that was supposed to reduce reliance on petroleum, the EU is now finding that biofuels may be destroying the rainforests as people chop down the trees to make way for fields devoted to producing biofuel. The costs of foodstuffs - like corn and soybeans are also rising because biofuels - ethanol - has meant that farmers make more money from biofuel than they do by selling it as food. Once again, the laws of unintended consequences comes to bear on the marketplace and everyone ends up paying for poor choices.