One way of thinking about offsetting is using it to price in the negative effects of the thing you want to do. Personally, I find it confusing to navigate tradeoffs between dollars, animal welfare, uncertain health costs, cravings for foods I can’t eat, and fewer options when getting food. The convenient thing about offsets is I can reduce the decision to “Is the burger worth $x to me?”, where $x = price of burger + price of offset.
A common response to this is “Well, if you thought it was worth it to pay $y to eliminate t hours of cow suffering, then you should just do that anyway, regardless of whether you buy the burger”. I think that’s a good point, but I don’t feel like it helps me navigate the confusing-to-me tradeoff between like five different not-intuitively-commensurable considerations.
One way of thinking about offsetting is using it to price in the negative effects of the thing you want to do. Personally, I find it confusing to navigate tradeoffs between dollars, animal welfare, uncertain health costs, cravings for foods I can’t eat, and fewer options when getting food. The convenient thing about offsets is I can reduce the decision to “Is the burger worth $x to me?”, where $x = price of burger + price of offset.
A common response to this is “Well, if you thought it was worth it to pay $y to eliminate t hours of cow suffering, then you should just do that anyway, regardless of whether you buy the burger”. I think that’s a good point, but I don’t feel like it helps me navigate the confusing-to-me tradeoff between like five different not-intuitively-commensurable considerations.