“Trees, Miss, big fuckers!”

You seriously have to think that the people at Qantas are morons. Or they think that we are.

For a flight between Brisbane and Sydney they claim that I can pay them $1.04 to be carbon neutral.

Say there are 200 people on the flight, that’s $208.

In Australia I am guessing you could plant a couple of trees with that, by the time you factor in land costs, labour, materials, licenses, OH&S, accounting services, legal costs, carbon consultants, certification, etc etc.

Those two trees, over their expected life, are supposedly going to capture enough carbon dioxide to offset that emitted by your one and a half hour flight.

That is, you create the carbon dioxide now and in two hundred year’s time the trees have captured it all back. That is, until they die and release it all back into the atmosphere.

The missing bit of logic here is that we need emissions to drop right now, in the next ten years.

They should be planting enough trees to capture all that carbon dioxide back in this calendar year. Then the offset cost would be around $200 per passenger. 

That is, the cost of the fare; don’t fly in fact!

My guess is that Qantas’s customers wouldn’t want to know this; they would prefer to feel as though they are doing the right thing but then to pay the minimum cost to do so.

And right there is the issue we face. Even the concerned folk, the one’s that want to preserve the conditions on this planet that make our existence viable, would prefer that someone else is inconvenienced by the effort to do so.