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My impression is that carbon offset plans are a rather imperfect and somewhat temporary solution - but still seem to be a step in the right direction, and at least signal consumer demand for green solutions. Despite its somewhat half-hearted nature, even these kinds of plans can be hard to find. I'm buying a house in Ohio, and I've found carbon-offset plans for my electricity and natural gas, but the house has an oil-burning furnace, and I'm having trouble finding any fuel oil services that do more than e.g. mention "oil is cleaner than gas because blah blah blah". I've seen a few for different states (and countries), but so far have come up short for Ohio.

Is there a site with a comprehensive listing of green-ish services, ideally filterable by state/county (and hopefully including heating oil as one of the services)?

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    You can just buy offsets directly, no need for a broker. The problems you will have auditing those offsets are the same as you would have auditing the broker (many offset schemes are worthless, and the whole idea is dubious. It's like going out to search for change off the sidewalk to pay off a car loan... it might work, but not for long, you need to get rid of the car loan)
    – Móż
    Mar 14, 2021 at 0:50

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Your best bet to offset is not via some carbon-offset program that are a big con, but rather by directing your money into green investments. Invest in wind power, solar power, geothermal heat pump etc stocks.

And when you have enough money invested in these stocks that you could purchase a geothermal heat pump system, you can decide whether the biggest impact is by continuing these investments or alternatively purchasing a geothermal heat pump.

For example, I have a non-plug-in-hybrid car that consumes some amount of gasoline. I drive so little that I have decided the best impact of my money is by investing that money into green energy stocks rather than purchasing an electric vehicle.

Someday it may be the case that green energy stocks become so expensive and electric vehicles so cheap that it's better to withdraw my money from the green energy investments and purchase an electric car with the money. If that day ever arrives, I'll be a proud electric vehicle owner.

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Even At four dollars a gallon, a gallon of gasoline has 20 lbs of CO2 thus only costs 400 dollars to emit. Heating oil costs US average of 2.50 a gallon (a typical household will consume 2 gallons of heating oil a day or 730 gallons a year or 1,825 dollars a year), Average produces 26 lbs of CO2 per gallon so heating oil per year is 9.5 tons a year. In other words ANY supposed climate scheme no matter how intrinsic or sophisticated is destined to fail, because at X amount of dollars per ton of CO2; the cost of eliminating CO2 emissions exceeds what it cost to emit it in the first place.

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  • You imply that it costs $20 to eliminate 1 lb of CO2 - where does that number come from?
    – Erhannis
    Mar 24, 2021 at 4:50
  • I was refering to Gasoline above. A gallon of heating oil costs $2.50, went burned produceds 26 lbs of CO2. Average american household that's heated using oil uses 1825 dollars worth or 730 gallons wiht 26 lbs per gallon that's 9.49 tons per year, so it produces 10.4 lbs of co2 per dollar spent. Carbon schemes that cost as much as 10-50 dollars per ton; that's 40 dollars a pound because it only costs 10 cents to emit it's a scam
    – LazyReader
    Mar 28, 2021 at 23:03

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