a few points:

1. I really dislike things such as the UK is doing now. OK, part of it is that fuel for intl aviation has been taxed lower than any other use, so this is partly equalizing the tax burden. But above and beyond that, they're loading on these taxes, while the benefits are not really solidly explained or known at this point (in terms of what your carbon-tax dollar is actually going towards, and how much it helps), and also they're based on a clearly political scale. I.e. flights within the UK, and to Europe, although there are more of them, and generate just as much carbon per mile (and even more probably, due to a higher fraction of flight spent takeoff/landing/taxiing), are taxed at a lower rate than transatlantic flights to the US! How can this be self-consistent? And what about the tax being higher for the business class/first class passenger? Why? Did they travel farther?

2. Why don't governments who are in favor of this sort of approach, simply tax *all* fossil fuels, per gallon used, rather than based on what they're used *for*? ie. especially penalizing air travelers, rather than car commuters who consume far more in total? This again strikes me as a very political choice about who they're trying not to antagonize. Kind of like some cities in the US trying to tax cell phone users.

3. another recent WSJ article points to the fact that the planting of a single
tree can be expected to remove about 3 to 15 pounds of CO2 per year. I am all for the "you've got to start somewhere" approach, but this is really a negligible help.

I guess what I'm saying is that I'm in favor of reducing consumption, reducing unnecessary travel, etc, but the way people are going about it, and especially latching onto this fad of carbon offsets, is discrediting the movement. I don't want to be paying for something that I hasn't been well researched, especially implemented on this huge scale!

Am I sounding completely unreasonable?

(a side note, I am a scientist, and I do think we should do something about these issues, but not in this way...)