The AAG’s Emissions Problem: Achieving Carbon Neutrality in a Post-offset World

Abstract

Professional organizations like the American Association of Geographers (AAG) face a conundrum and an ethical dilemma: Do we continue to drive and fly around the country, and world, to share our research—much of it examining topics related to resource extraction, uneven development, crises of capitalism, justice, and human rights—while the very action of travel contributes to global climate change and exacerbates many of the problems we explore in our work? In this article I suggest that as AAG members work to lower and potentially neutralize the carbon footprint of the annual meeting, we must turn a critical eye to the limits and possibilities of the carbon offset mechanism and explore emerging alternatives. These alternatives, I argue, are part of an emerging “post-offset world,” where carbon removal and drawdown activities carry the name “offset” but do not fit the definition.