Ethical travel company drops offsets

Ethical Performance this month reports that responsibletravel.com has removed the facility for its customers to offset their travel emissions, arguing that effort needs to be reinvested into actually reducing greenhouse gases. The travel agent was established in 2001 with backing from private investors including Anita Roddick and was one of the first in the tourism industry to introduce an offset scheme. However, it now feels that carbon mitigation must be its first priority and that offseting distracts from the real issues.

Responsibletravel.com turns over more than £10m and offers a choice of 3,500 holidays, all of which can be booked as "land only" packages that don't involve flying. It now offers "carbon cautions" to customers, giving advice on reducing emissions through lifestyle changes. Its actions are likely to be welcomed by NGOs such as Friends of the Earth, which has called offset schemes "a dangerous distraction", and Sinkswatch, which says that offsetting schemes run the risk of exacerbating climate change by providing a false expectation that they are making a difference.

Carbon-neutral credibility

As Dell becomes the latest corporation to trumpet its carbon neutral status, I'm wondering whether they've shot themselves in the foot. Until now, I've been impressed with Dell's sustainability efforts - they seem sincere and they've made some good improvements. But in order to claim carbon neutral status requires carbon offsetting - and that, for me, is where the rot sets in. The theory that you can compensate for your own emissions by paying somebody else to reduce theirs just doesn't stand up - for an illustration of this visit cheatneutral.com.

I'm not against carbon offsetting per se - take air travel as an example. Even if you do your best to avoid flying to meetings, sometimes in a global ecomomy there's no alternative. When you've exhausted all the other options, incurring a specific carbon impact and then offsetting it is OK. But that doesn't make the activity carbon neutral. What offsetting does is neutralise both the negative carbon impact of the act you wish to offset and the positive carbon impact of the action taken to offset it. At best, it gets us back to square one (although that depends on the effectiveness of the offsetting project - and that's a whole new can of worms). It's just a gesture.

Personally, I find it more credible when a company claims to be low carbon. This acknowledges the fact that the vast majority of businesses have a detrimental carbon impact, and that the best we can hope to achieve is to reduce it. By all means take some steps to help mitigate these impacts by investing in carbon-positive projects - and even pick some individual impacts to offset. But to claim that any of this makes your business carbon-neutral is just disingenuous.