Global Warming In the News

Undo environmental damage caused by your flight to Jamaica! Make up for all those fumes you expel on your drive to Des Moines! Buy yourself some carbon offsets. Carbon offsets, the latest buzzword in travel, means that you pay a little extra to help reduce the Earth's carbon dioxide levels when your travel increases it. Travelers spanning the globe in jets, cars and big RVs pollute. Offsets are one way to make travel green.

Let's say your plane to Jamaica throws half a ton of nasty carbon dioxide into the atmosphere.

You can pay $3.42 to a company called Carbonfund.org, and it will plant trees, fund a wind power project or entice a landfill to capture methane gas instead of spewing it.

VoilÀ! You are suddenly "carbon neutral." You've reduced your "carbon footprint."

And you can feel good about traveling. Or maybe not.

"There are trips I would like to take, but I am hesitating to travel overseas because of the pollution involved in air travel," says Brigit Macomber, 46, finance manager for the Ecology Center in Ann Arbor, an environmental advocacy group.

"I wanted to go to Scotland. I also wanted to go to Australia," she says. "But that would be really egregious from a carbon offset point of view."

Macomber is not alone in her concern.

If given a choice, 67% of Americans would rather travel in an eco-friendly way, according to a survey done this spring by the online travel company Orbitz. About 65% of travelers would be more likely to stay at a hotel if it used solar or wind power, and 63% would pay more to rent a hybrid vehicle or stay at a "green" hotel.

Most telling, 52% of travelers would be willing to "donate a small portion of their vacation budget to help save the environment when booking a trip."

And that's where the travel industry comes in. You can't do it for cruising or rail travel yet, but airlines and travel companies are making it easy to de-carbonize your vacation.

The average American is responsible for about 44,000 pounds of carbon dioxide emissions per year, by far the most of any people on the planet. Travel is only one part of our lifestyle that does it. Air travel accounts for about 2%-3% of all the carbon emissions in the world, but the number of planes in the skies is growing.

Plenty of programs

When you buy a ticket on Delta Airline's Web site, you can now also buy an offset -- $5.50 for a domestic flight or $11 for an international flight. Your offset will fund new trees in a Louisiana nature refuge. In June, Delta became the first U.S. airline to sell carbon offsets, joining Air Canada, British Airways, SAS and Cathay Pacific. Next month, Continental will start selling offsets.

You can offset your entire trip on Travelocity or offset a flight on Orbitz through their nonprofit carbon-offset partners.

You can offset flights on Expedia, too, but it is through its for-profit partner TerraPass. Run by former Expedia CEO Erik Blachford, its prices are higher than the other portals (it's $29.99 for an international flight offset on Expedia versus $11 on Orbitz). Why do prices differ? Each offset program uses a different formula. The formula depends on what kind of projects the program funds (some plant trees, some fund wind or solar projects, some buy complicated energy credits).

Each program has its own calculator to determine how much you owe. Some funds charge a set amount by the type of flight (domestic or international), while others charge by exact distance traveled. For-profit funds charge more than nonprofits, and the most expensive funds charge about 10 times as much as the cheapest.

Choose wisely

So how does the public know which fund is best? It doesn't. There are no government standards.

The president of Britain's easyJet Airlines in June accused the industry of being "snake oil sellers" that charge up to a 30% commission. A carbon offset study group at Tufts University in Boston warns that some firms double-sell credits or fund CO{-2}-reducing projects that would have been done anyway.

Travelers need to do their homework before buying carbon offsets, says Todd Parker of Michigan's Delta Institute, a sustainable development organization in Lansing. He likes carbon fund nonprofits because they must file disclosure forms with the IRS about exactly where their money went. But even then, he advises travelers to visit the actual Web sites of carbon offset companies before they buy from them through a travel provider.

"Ask questions," he says. "If you get vague answers ... then save your money. In the rush to do something green, consumers are naive because they don't fully understand the (carbon offset) concept."

Tufts does not recommend carbon offsets that go to plant trees, because a tree must live for 30 years or so before it's an efficient CO{-2} absorber -- and if it's cut down or burns down, there goes your credit. But at least tree planting is something the average person can imagine -- that the maple tree they plant today will suck up their jet fumes tomorrow. And the Conservation Fund, which is a partner with Delta and Travelocity, plants its carbon offset-purchased trees in a natural refuge -- then takes care of them.

More radical approaches

So buy yourself some carbon offsets today, and you can travel anywhere you'd like. Or can you?

For some purists, buying carbon offsets is just the way rich travelers pay for their sins.

"These programs are supposed to be a tool to reduce carbon, not reduce guilt," says Mike Shriberg of Ann Arbor. He is director of the policy advocacy group Environment Michigan. He not only buys carbon offsets, he has cut down on driving, even on vacation.

If you really want to help the planet, advocates say, stop traveling so much. Don't fly -- it puts greenhouse gases into the upper atmosphere. Don't drive long distances. Take the bus. Take the train. Or don't go at all.

Tufts' carbon offset consumer guide warns: "If you have a choice, don't fly -- every time you fly to Hawaii or ... some other exotic beaches, your air travel will contribute to the bleaching and dying of reefs you wanted to admire there." It urges taking the train or bus instead, and if you must fly, never fly first class because you will account for even more pollution.

Mark Ellingham, the British publisher of the Rough Guides travel book series, has flown all over the world. He now encourages others to fly as little as possible.

Go fewer places but stay longer at your destination, he urges. If you must travel, buy carbon offsets. Ellingham also has advocated a "green tax" on each international airline ticket of up to $500 that would go to carbon-offset programs.

That tax idea likely will go nowhere. But the Ann Arbor Ecology Center's Macomber thinks that more travelers will start buying carbon offsets if they know they are reputable. Lots of good-hearted people want to do something to help the Earth, she says, "and the government isn't doing anything."

"I think there is a groundswell of people willing to do more, to sacrifice more," Macomber says.

Even going so far as to give up their Scotland vacation.