Climate crisis

Has anyone used any carbon offsetting schemes?

No chance government is going to do anything soon so keen to look at carbon offsetting things like car, house & work travel if possible...

I've googled a little but finding it hard to determine genuine initiatives where my money will go directly to projects.

I used to work in carbon accounting and looked at this maybe 8-10 years ago. A lot of the schemes looked like good ideas but were based on poor information, so the actual carbon savings for most of them were flaky at best.

The bigger the carbon emissions for the offsetting scheme (e.g. offsetting against air travel), the less effective they appeared to be. A couple of years ago BA had a fairly significant offsetting scheme option for its flights but when I dug into it with them, it looked very much like they hadn't really been able to make a very good estimation of any carbon savings. This was probably just through lack of expertise in the field and they'd done it just on a best guess.

In my opinion, not much has changed. Most of the carbon and sustainability research fields have all been canned under the Tory government or were lost when Brexit was voted for, because we lost our ability to take part in the European projects. So there's still a lot of poor information out there and the offsetting schemes are not as worthwhile as they might look.