Yeah and my rationale for deciding how much is a little involved… Essentially, carbon offset markets are either straight up scams or over hyping the impact. Instead I donate directly to charities doing good work related to the environment or the fall out from the climate crisis. The U.S. EPA estimates that each metric ton of CO2 emitted costs society and the environment around $200 in damage from things like natural disasters, civil unrest from displacement, extinction of species, etc. the average US household emits about 17 MT/year.

So around tax return season I go to FootprintCalculator.org and estimate how many MT of CO2 our household emitted the year prior. Then I set monthly recurring donations to the charities to roughly equal the amount of $200 times MT spread across the year. So it’s fairly automated/low effort, and just comes out a little bit each month.

The types of charities vary, but they’re all doing incredible work, here’s some of them:

Coalition for Rainforest Nations (the operate globally with indigenous and local communities to do everything possible to protect rainforests and reforest areas. The donations really stretch far because they predominantly work in low income areas)

ProPublica (no paywall investigative news organization that has really hard hitting reporting that holds polluters accountable by government agencies)

Lahaina Community Land Trust (supporting Native Hawaiian victims of the Lahaina fire and trying to prevent their land from being bought up by private equity and billionaires)

World Wildlife Foundation (great work with preserving biodiversity and raising awareness of nature with the public. It’s hard to care about something if you don’t know about it)

Union of Concerned Scientists (political advocacy org)

Local food bank, urban green space advocates, and housing support orgs (the most vulnerable people in our communities experience extreme weather much differently than those of us with AC and a solid roof)

Also agree with the other commenter about giving time