Let's be honest, offsets are a brand of corporate social responsibility, similar to marketing spend. They are ripe for abuse and don't do a whole lot in aggregate.
To be fair, when we're talking about an airliner buying offsets, realistically what else could they possibly do? We are not flying commercial airplanes without emissions during this century. From the individual company standpoint, it is a net benefit to leverage their profits for emission reductions in other sectors. This is similar to Norway's approach of leveraging fuel profits to subsidize emission-offset projects, i.e. outcompete the emission-burning activities that the market would pay for.
To be fair, when we're talking about an airliner buying offsets, realistically what else could they possibly do? We are not flying commercial airplanes without emissions during this century. From the individual company standpoint, it is a net benefit to leverage their profits for emission reductions in other sectors. This is similar to Norway's approach of leveraging fuel profits to subsidize emission-offset projects, i.e. outcompete the emission-burning activities that the market would pay for.