Yes. If you – with money contributions – remove as much emissions from the atmosphere as you cause, you can call yourself climate neutral. It might sound unfair and provoking that you can just pay money to get to call yourself climate neutral, but the good news is that it’s possible to achieve great climate benefits with relatively small amounts of money. Enough benefits that most people easily can reduce emissions – through climate projects in developing countries – more than the emissions they cause by their own lifestyle.
But at the same time, it’s not enough to help others reduce their emissions if we are to succeed in stopping climate change. We must simultaneously also reduce our own emissions. Therefore we at GoClimate.org see the investment in climate projects only as a first step in the right direction. But after that step has been taken we must also reduce our own climate emissions.
Unfortunately it’s often rather hard for most people to reduce their climate footprint since a change in lifestyle often is needed – for instance if you are to sell your car or stop flying. And big changes in habits and lifestyle has proven very hard for us humans to do. Therefore we have chosen to make it simple for people to contribute to slow down climate change by investing in climate projects. When this first step is taken we want to inspire all our users to gradually slow down their own climate footprint.
The approach of getting people to take a small step first and then making bigger changes is called Foot-in-the-door-technique. You can read more about how it works here: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Foot-in-the-door_technique
Foot-in-the-door-technique is the reason why we believe in getting as many people as possible to take a first step in their climate commitment now, and why we think it needs to be both really simple and a positive experience. It is simply much more likely that people make more and bigger changes in their lifestyle once they have begun to take a step in the right direction.
If you want to know more, go to GoClimate.org