So, I’d been hearing about Carbon Offsetting for a while now, and it piqued my interest. If you’re not familiar with the idea, a carbon offset is a fee you can pay to offset the carbon emissions from some activity of your choice. The idea is that the fee you pay goes towards environmental projects and you pay enough to remove the amount of carbons you emit, thereby making your activity “carbon-neutral”.

I first heard about it on the British Airways website while playing around with my reservation on our upcoming honeymoon. It made the offset seem pretty cheap (the example was something like £4.40 for a London to Barcelona flight, which I’ll be taking!) and I thought that would be a pretty cool thing to do. Mind you, after calculating all of the flights (Toronto -> London -> Barcelona; Istanbul -> London -> Toronto; multiplied by 2 people), I was looking more like a couple hundred bucks, so I am still deciding on what to do about that.

But the seed was planted. I looked around a bit, and Air Canada also supports offsets, through an organization called Zerofootprint. This organization apparently also does environmental consulting for businesses on making your workplace carbon neutral. On the individual front, they’ve done something I really like; an environmental networking site. That’s right! Make your profile, upload pictures, calculate your carbon emissions and discuss ways about reducing your carbon footprint with other like-minded folks. It’s Facebook meets Greenpeace!

On a side note, I did a quick calculation on my carbon footprint and I’m WAY above average. I have to play around a bit more with it…

Zerofootprint’s main carbon reducing project (what it uses your offset money to do) is a reforestation project in Maple Ridge B.C. that focuses on fast-tracking a natural reforestation process. Not only does your offset make your carbon neutral, it also creates a nice scenery on the west coast, and more importantly, creates jobs in Canada.

So, I decided to try it out. We’re flying to Vancouver for a convention at the end of the month, so I popped a couple cities into the calculator, and bam, it spits out $6.40 offset. Pop in the credit card and a couple minutes later I’ve negated the carbon emissions that we’re going to be responsible for on our upcoming flight. Pretty cool! You get a nifty receipt. Curiously, there’s GST on the offset, which I think would be a good idea for the House of Commons to reconsider.

If you want to check it out, head over to http://zerofootprint.net and register to join!