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by OmarIsmail 2534 days ago
Maybe you should expand your offering so that I can live guilt free. That's what I really want. To maintain my standard of living without harming the planet.
3 comments

That's really interesting. We haven't seriously considered what it would take to be able to live guilt free without changing lifestyle dramatically. It certainly means doing way more than offsetting, but there is a (perhaps distant) future where people can have an amazing standard of living while still helping our planet thrive.

For instance—if you were to get your community on 100% renewable energy, help politicians who care get elected, fund clean manufacturing/construction companies, and maybe do a handful of other things maybe you could live guilt free. We will have to think about this more, I'm glad you phrased it like this.

I've read this subthread 3 times and can't tell if you're being sarcastic or not.
That’s impossible unfortunately. Money alone won’t “buy” a guilt free, business-as-usual lifestyle in the face of this emergency. I suggest doing a bit more research to see for yourself what I mean.
This is clearly false. Subsidizing the conversion of the the entire world to clean energy does more good than burning an ounce of coal does harm.

Conversely, planting one tree is insufficient to buy an SUV guilt-free.

There’s inherently a crossover point somewhere.

Yeah this is pretty interesting. There's some set of activities (getting everyone on renewables, making clean construction/ag/transportation cost effective, political action, etc) that would actually allow someone to be guilt free. It would be way more money than just offsetting the footprint but it could fully cover all externalities....

That's kind of theoretical still, but perhaps we could crack it