Flying the Eco-friendly Skies
GOOD MORNING, JEEEETTTTT LAAAAGGGG!
As I was flipping through the June/July 2006 issue of Plenty on the plane, I found a story on pg. 26, coincidentally about buying carbon offsets for air travel, which I thought provided a top-notch primer for people unfamiliar with the concept. Why bother to offset carbon dioxide emissions from your activities, for instance?
[L]et’s imagine, just for argument’s sake, that we agreed to limit emissions of the heat-trapping gas to the quantity that the world’s forests and oceans can absorb each year. Assuming equal distribution of “polluting rights” among all 6.5 billion people on earth, each of us would be allowed a maximum of 6,600 pounds of CO2 emissions per year. That sounds like a lot until you do the math. You’ve probably got a refrigerator, right? That will cost you 220 pounds each year. Those 20 miles you commute each day? Subtract 4,400 pounds from your budget. Taking a flight from New York to Costa Rica to hug trees in the rainforest? Uh oh. That’ll be 4,000 pounds. Game over!
Not all human activities are created equal, and air travel is, according to Plenty, a “noteworthy culprit.” Says the eco-rag: “Some climatologists say that aircraft emissions such as nitrogen oxides exacerbate the heat-trapping qualities of CO2 when they’re released a high altitudes—say, from a jet engine at a 30,000-foot cruising altitude.” Ok, so knowing this but unable to eschew all air travel, how do we keep ourselves from staying awake at night?
For those who wish to make amends for their jet-setting habits, a growing number of organizations sell peace of mind in the form of carbon offsets. With the help of online calculators, you can estimate the amount of CO2 your air travel would generate, and then match this figure to the financial support needed to subtract an equivalent amount of CO2 from the global equation. American Forests, for example, can remove an estimated 5 tons of CO2 from the atmosphere each year with every acre of trees it plants. Other companies sell offsets to provide funding for renewable-energy initiatives.
One couple, who offset the flights their entire wedding party took to their vow-exchanging affair, calls offsetting an “additional lever we can pull to move the economics and production of electric power in the right direction.”
Still, we shouldn’t use offsets to give us the carte blanche to jetset where and as we please. The point isn’t to excuse a “high-polluting lifestyle,” says Plenty. “We need people to cut their pollution,” Dan Becker, director of the Sierra Club’s global warming program, tells the magazine. “If buying offsets makes people feel less guilty about their polluting ways, our children lose out.”
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