CO2 offsets

Going on a trip? you might consider buying carbon offsets. Carbon offsets are intended to be a way of negating you carbon foot print, this is often used when people travel by air. If your trip produces X tons of CO2 you can pay a company a few dollars per tone to off set the carbon produced by your trip. Sounds great if you are feeling a bit guilty about the cloud of CO2 left behind as you jet your way around the planet.
Most of the companies that will take your money for the CO2 you made will use it to plant trees, which is nice, I like trees, but you just burnt a load of fossil fuel on your trip, that came from crude oil that was locked away in the earth millions of years ago and was supost to stay there. Planting trees is great, but any bit of land left long enough will probably end up with trees on it, so paying someone to plant them just speeds up the process a bit. Trees also die, wither they are cut down for wood, or just die from old age they will eventually release all the CO2 they absorbed during their life back into the atmosphere, they are only a temporary carbon sink. It might be more effective to pay someone to bury a tree in anaerobic mud so it can be converted to coal over the next few million years, however this is probably not practical.
You could decide to invest you offset money in a company that does research into carbon sequestration, basically catching the carbon released after fossil fuels are burned, then hiding it away somewhere. There are several ideas, of how to do this. The CO2 could be pumped down oil wells, this would help pressurize the reservoir and allow more oil to be produced - Great, more fossil fuel!
CO2 can also be reacted with minerals like Olivene and Pyroxene to produce minerals like Calcium Carbonate and Magnesite. These reactions occur naturally but only where CO2 is in contact with the rock. To lock away a significant volume of CO2 would require a large surface area of Olivene or Pyroxene, so significant of mining and crushing would be required - how much CO2 would be produced by this activity, not to mention transporting the CO2 to the crushed rock.
You could also invest your money in companies that promote energy efficient appliances in 3rd world countries - great fit Africa out with Compact Fluorescent light bulbs! (you know my feelings about those) Looking at the problem in the long term there is a finite(ish) volume of fossil fuel on the planet so efficient light bulbs may just allow us to keep using fossil fuels for a bit longer, but but eventually putting the same volume on CO2 into the air.

As far as I see it we have to leave that Carbon that is locked away in the form of Coal or crude oil, it has been naturally sequestered by the earth millions of years ago, why mess with that?

My answer is to invest money into companies or organizations that are doing research into alternative energy, that does not tap into any fossil fuels, or non-renewable resources. At some point we are going to have to use non-fossil fuels for our energy as fossil fuels will run out one day. Why not attempt to stop using them before they run out, it is a bridge we are going to have to cross one day better to do it while we have the choice then when we are forced to.

Lots of research has been done into alternative fuels in the past, during WWII and the energy crisis in the '70s people experimented with wood gas as a fuel 100s of trucks and tractors were successfully converted to on wood, so when the need is there it can be done - unfortunately the current need has not been recognized.

I am not going to pay some company to plant trees to I can feel less guilty about flying around the planet for my work, but I am going to look into investing some money into companies that are working on viable alternatives to fossil fuels as an energy source for industry and transportation. I can't wait to fly in an Ethanol or BioJet fuel plane, or maybe throw a junk of wood in the car for a trip into town.