Is offsetting carbon use by buying credits a way for the rich to cheat?

[RestoreGore]

I have been thinking about this for a while, and I would really like some sincere thoughts on this. The big thing now is being carbon neutral, whereby you purchase what are called "offsets" with certain companies or organizations that supposedly forward your offsets to a sustainable charity to balance out your usage. My questions then is this: Is that a way for the rich to cheat on being responsible for their usage, or is offsetting enough?

I ask this because there are many poor in this country and around the world who would never be able to afford to offset any carbon they contribute to the environment. Also, we have no choice in the U.S. now but to buy gas for our cars since the rich control those markets, and we have no choice in many instances but to drive those cars to our jobs. Therefore, in my case I have compensated by luckliy finding a job I can walk to, using mass transit or walking unless I need to travel on a highway, and then conserving gas by not going over the speed limit and checking my tire pressure. But isn't that something the rich should be doing initially too on a grander scale, especially since they contribute to the crisis more than the poor and it is the poor of this world who are feeling the affects of this?

My point is that this is a moral issue, but I think some rich believe they can simply buy their way out of responsibility for putting it up there in the first place, which I don't believe serves the goal we need to attain in order to see this crisis effectively mitigated now. Even now, oil companies are getting on the bandwagon by stating they are "looking into" other enregy sources like biofuel as if that makes up for the fact that they are still contributing to the problem by primarily selling the fossil fuels contributing to the CO2 levels in our atmosphere that will stay up ther now for years. How long do they think they can get away with that?

The main idea of mitigating this crisis is to actually be responsible enough to lessen your impact intitially, is it not? Or is that simply not possible based on human nature? Of course, some would say that the money they donate to plant trees or build a sustainable office building makes up for what they use, and it may in the longterm and I am not stating it isn't a good thing. But since scientists claim we only have ten years before a tipping point and stated that years ago, shouldn't we all whether rich or poor be lessening our initial footprint? I'm just wondering if some may see this as a way to cheat by not changing their own lifestyles, and I do not believe in the longrun that it serves the planet well. There unfortunately aren't enough trees we could plant right now to make up for what is already up in our atmosphere, and it would seem the technologies many are offsetting to are still taking too long to get to market on a wide enough scale to make an impact. I would then think the main message would be, offset to a degree, but don't think you are off the hook for what you put up there. What do you think?