Does carbon offsetting make you fly more?

I had to book a flight recently and I “splurged” and paid the whole $5 or something around that to offset my carbon from the flight. This got me thinking about the impacts that offset might have. While the offset makes me feel a little bit better about the flight that I am taking, I can’t see the offsets making me want to fly more. This was the question that Bösehans, Bolderdijk, and Wan (2020) asked in a series of two research studies.

They found that environmentally conscious travellers did feel guilt about flight travel, but offsets didn’t reduce this guilt. And, perhaps more interesting, the presence of offsets actually decreased the likelihood that someone would take a flight. For me, paying the $5 really didn’t change my thoughts, other than perhaps indicating that I “did what was available given the need.” Being able to offset doesn’t change my attitude about flights. I’ll take them, but I know it’s bad for the environment, so I don’t do a lot of flights without other meaning. What I mean by that is that I’m not going to book a holiday that I have to fly to just for the sake of it. There has to be a bigger reason to go to that specific location. Then, when I’m there, I like to maximize my time as much as I can so that I can avoid going there again for a while at least. For me, the presence of a $5 offset seems so insufficient that it doesn’t assuage my guilt. And if the offset was higher, I probably couldn’t justify the money. So I definitely understand the people who said that they wouldn’t change the number of flights they take if offsets are done.

In one of the studies, along with the availability of offsets to purchase, there was also information about the environmental harm of flying. This raises one of my thoughts. I think the presence of an offset itself makes it more apparent that there is harm happening. It makes me think a little of the warnings on things like alcohol and cigarettes, except that, in this case, the message is along the lines of hey, this is bad, but pay this extra money, and you can go back to not caring. So, I think it is interesting that people didn’t necessarily think about it that way.

I’m not sure what the outcome of this is and the researchers too identified lots of potential thoughts that this could move towards, but there is no clear direction from this. The offsets don’t encourage people who are environmentally conscious to fly more, so it doesn’t help airlines get more customers. As someone who is environmentally conscious, I see this as pointing to the need to just improve the impacts of air travel and to explore aspects like slow travel that don’t require flights.

So my question for you is have you paid the offset charge on a flight before? Did it impact your feelings about taking that flight? If you do experience guilt about taking flights, what would help reduce your guilt?