This was a great article.

I heard an interesting story on Talk of the Nation yesterday about Offsets.
It was spawned by an editorial in USA Today (http://blogs.usatoday.com/oped/2007/09/offset-away-our.html )

Here is a link to the show:
http://www.npr.org/templates/story/story.php?storyId=14771204

I take a lot of issue with Peter Schweizer's op ed, especially the "tofu offset" which IMO is absolutely ridiculous, but what I was most interested in were some of the listener comments on the show.
Especially one person who stated something like "you can't buy away your moral obligation".

With carbon offsets, wouldn't a dollar be better spent where you know that 100% of it is going to actually reduce your carbon usage? With Terrapass and the like, who knows how much of that $1 is really attempting to reduce your carbon footprint, let alone if those technologies being employed are actually working. Carbon offsetting is still very much an unproven, under-researched concept.

The biggest thing that offsets lack are standards and accountability. Without a set of well developed, defined, and agreed upon standards and an open accountability process, it's my belief that the "offset boom" is a temporal one.

"Whatever their intentions, these companies operate in an accountability vacuum. While the Kyoto Protocol established widely accepted guidelines for countries looking to offset their greenhouse gas emissions, at the consumer level there's little agreement about anything--no universal standards for estimating a person's carbon footprint, no agreement on the technologies that are most helpful in reducing global warming and no regulatory body to oversee the industry."
-http://www.thenation.com/doc/20070507/thompson_moles

"In the case of TerraPass, one of its major offset investments--and this gets complicated--takes the form of climate offset derivatives sold on the Chicago Climate Exchange for a methane-burning dump owned by Waste Management. A publicly traded company with $20 billion in assets and a long history of environmental abuses, Waste Management is hated by most enviros. In filings with the Securities and Exchange Commission, the company admits to facing four lawsuits for allegedly transgressing state and federal air pollution laws. Waste Management owns sixteen of the most toxic sites in the country--all locations listed on the EPA's Superfund roster--and is budgeting more than $260 million for environmental remediation at its landfills and dumps, SEC records show."
-http://www.thenation.com/doc/20070507/thompson_moles