My current tourism frustration that came to my mind first is carbon offsetting schemes offered by airlines. It is a very complex issue that definitely has no simple answer to it.
It is nowadays very common to be offered the choice to offset one’s carbon footprint for a flight, directly in the booking process. It’s just a little box to tick that will add however much to the final price to be paid – depending on the length of your flight, it can be a considerable amount.
I don’t know how to feel about it.
On the individual level, it gives the buyer the chance to at least contribute in the smallest way to make up for the damage done to the environment through their trip. Potentially, it is an added financial burden, when perhaps the flight is already expensive enough. Few may opt in, most likely skip it. But the trouble is that it seems to take the responsibility for our carbon footprint off of us: If we have offset our flight, then there is nothing to feel bad about anymore, and also no reason to change our behaviour, or so the logic could go. We can go on as many flights as we can afford!
But of course, carbon offsetting is inherently flawed and unfortunately not the fix that we are all hoping for so we can continue polluting endlessly without having to change. Leaving the fact aside that there are plenty of offsetting schemes out on the market that are clear scams: On a macro-level, the business of carbon offsetting can further delay any meaningful environmental action. It also attributes the responsibility fully to the consumer and not the producer, thereby craftily working around any “polluter pays” morals. Moreover, it continues to play into the idea that we only need to find a technical solution to our emissions problem, and that once we have found it, climate change will no longer be an issue. It is certainly not better than choosing not to fly at all. But might it still be better than flying and not attempting anything to pay off the environmental debt?
If we look at the issue from a care ethics perspective that we have extended to include our relationship to the environment, we are certainly failing on a big scale. I actually think that the divide between the micro- and the macro-level regarding climate change is one of the major reasons why so many people continue to be inactive to the degree of paralysis. It is incredibly hard to translate the macro-level issue of climate change that affects us all on a global scale to the micro-level changes that we all collectively need to make. If we applied a lens of care for nature and the planet, we would have to admit our reliance on it and our deficiencies in fulfilling our responsibilities. Instead, carbon offsets seem to be the epitome of applying a utilitarian lens: We calculate how many greenhouse gases we emit (how much “bad” we are putting out into the world) so we can hypothetically pay enough to take them out of the equation again (adding enough “good” so that it evens out). Unfortunately, it does not work that way. But we might have to go along with it until we have something better.