Microsoft is the winner in this PR battle:
"When it comes to carbon, neutrality is not enough," said Microsoft president Brad Smith.
Fucking right.
But how are you going to reverse it? It has never been done. The technology doesn't exist, except as ideas or sometimes prototypes. It doesn't scale.
With greenhouse emissions you can't put the genie back into the bottle. It took a very green earth with no industry on it billions of years to lock up the carbon that we've released over the last few centuries. If all this talk of carbon offset was worth anything, atmospheric CO2 and methane would be reducing. It's not. It's still accelerating. Putting money into carbon offset programs doesn't suck your flight's CO2 out of the atmosphere, or somehow remove the methane produced by the herd of cows that produced every steak you've ever eaten. It's not any different to paying the church to absolve you of sin. One could argue that the Catholic church did some good with the money (maybe?) but the main effect of buying indulgences is that you feel better about your sins. Californians still watered their lands during droughts because they felt that they somehow earned the right: "I paid for that water"
Sorry. I'm just entirely pessimistic about this. As a kid I used to think that people were so stupid back in the 1600s-1800s, for causing extinctions left and right. The unfortunate Dodo, Tasmanian Tiger, Great Auk, Passenger pigeon. The generations that inhabited earth within our living memory have done far worse. We are now seeing some of the dreaded "feedback loops" we were warned about: Methane release from melting ice, decreased summer ice coverage reducing reflected solar energy.
Mass extinctions will be the new normal. We'll start to see more of those weird "hundred of thousands of birds mysteriously dead" posts.
The only thing that made a dent in our emissions was covid-19. I'm starting to wonder if it wasn't part of some "benevolent" 12 Monkeys plot. (Kidding! That was humans being fucking stoooooopid too)