Can an airline be completely carbon neutral? National Geographic Traveler contributing editor Chris Elliott spoke with Alexi Huntley Khajavi, the chief marketing officer for Costa Rican carrier NatureAir, to learn more about the company’s commitment t…

The Nature Conservancy is one of the leading organizations in the world for developing a plan for preserving more of our forests to help combat our pollution problems as well as preserving quality of life for the communities where the forests are located. For the most part, I think they’re doing a very good job on guiding local, state, and national governments on how to manage their forests and leveraging their usefulness to the global environment in exchange for protecting them.

A lot of work goes into certifying just how many “carbon offsets” are available in any grove of forests, down to identifying the specific value for a tree given it’s species, age, and size based on the scientific data that they know about the trees. This information is then put into a global database that manages the availability of the offsets, and each transaction is tied to a unique identification number to ensure that you can’t oversell the offsets. It’s very sophisticated and ensures that no fraudulent transactions take place.

Mr. Khajavi rightly points out something major, in my opinion. You simply cannot buy your way to carbon neutrality by purchasing carbon offsets. It’s artificial, and personally I find it tacky. If you want to buy these “offsets” to protect nature and help the environment, that is fine, but you cannot claim that you’re reducing your carbon footprint without actually reducing the amount of carbon you’re putting into the environment. And swapping of these credits between companies simply means that one company agrees to reduce its emissions so that another company can increase theirs without any financial penalties. Such phony-baloney finagling is nonsense.

Let’s invest in cleaner sources of fuel, better technology to reduce emissions, and ways to reduce our energy usage. That will do as much for the environment, if not more, than buying up forests. A tree preserved in Brazil will have little effect on the amount of smog hanging over Los Angeles, but if everybody could find ways to reduce or eliminate their carbon output in the Los Angeles basin, that heavy cloud could be lifted quite a bit.

Carbon neutral means you pay someone for the right to get a piece of paper telling you that they have ‘offset’ your use of carbon. I can give them the same piece of paper. I will not cut down the trees in my yard and can sell the offset this coming year for an entire airline. Then I can not cut them down again next year, and offset some more.

Carbon neutral is a scam – pure and simple. What are the standards? How do we prove that the guy you send the money to has actually offset your emissions? Or just bought himself a new Mercedes? C’mon – this is a scam pure and simple.