Pardon me, but will you please take care of my CO2 emissions?

I've always been sceptical about carbon offset schemes. Buying offsets is rather like jumping on a kind of carbon carousel, which bounces the emissions responsibility elsewhere. I spoke with Richard Dyer, transport and climate change campaigner for Friends Of The Earth earlier this week and he told me that carbon offsetting is just an excuse to carry on usual behaviour because you've 'done your bit'.

It transpires that one of the very first travel agencies to introduce a carbon offsetting programme, Responsible Travel in the UK, has now become one of the first to discontinue such a scheme. In announcing their decision, they said that offsetting was distracting tourists from a need to act responsibly and amounted to nothing more than a kind of medieval pardon.

I couldn't agree more. Paying for offsets will never be anything other than a mechanism for either the wealthy or the guilty to sign cheques for someone else to undertake 'green' projects on their behalf. Bravo to Responsible Travel.