Cheatneutral

Last night was the final evening of the Angel Film Festival, a splendid showcase of independent films that takes place in London once a year. The films were as ever funny or sweet or clever or had someone dying unexpectedly at the end, but the most interesting to my mind was Cheatneutral, a documentary about a website that offers to create a market in infidelity offsetting.

The point of this clearly nonsensical proposition is to send up the suspiciouly convenient fiction that is carbon offsetting. If it is obvious to anyone that you cannot actually "cancel out" a romantic indiscretion by paying someone else to be extra-faithful on your behalf, perhaps it should be equally obvious that carbon footprints in the developed world will only really go down if we liberate less carbon.