If you fly a lot for business or pleasure, you may feel bad about adding to global warming.
"For most people, flying is kind of magical. Too bad that stuff coming out of the engines isn't fairy dust," says Adria Vasil, author of Ecoholic: Your Guide to the Most Environmentally Friendly Products, Information and Services in Canada (Vintage, $24.95).
Is there a way to ease the pain of a guilty conscience, aside from finding other ways to travel?
Yes, says Vasil, you can ease the impact with "green tags." This means you offset the carbon your flight creates by investing in renewable energy or planting trees.
Air Canada recently launched a carbon offset program with Zerofootprint, a non-profit organization in Toronto.
WestJet works with Offsetters.ca on renewable energy projects in Canada and overseas. When you book flights through the Offsetters website, the airline contributes 2 per cent of the base fare, with no cost to the customer, says spokesperson Gillian Bentley.
Other airlines plan to follow suit. But you can try to neutralize the impact of flights on your own, using online calculators.
At Green My Flight (www.greenmyflight.com), a for-profit offshoot of Uniglobe Travel in Vancouver, you can do some what-if scenarios.
Say you're flying from Toronto to Sydney, Australia, and back. You put in both airports and get the following information: Total distance, 31,138.8 kilometres; total emissions, 4,231.8 kilograms; program cost, $105.79.
The program cost is $22.92 for a round trip between Toronto and Victoria, B.C. and $7 for a round trip between Toronto and Windsor, Ont. Other flight carbon calculators are available at My Climate (www.myclimate.org) and TerraPass (www.terrapass.com).
Where can you invest your offset contributions?
Green My Flight sponsors a wind energy farm in Alberta. It says the project verifiably reduces emissions of greenhouse gases, according to the standards set by the Environmental Choice Program of Environment Canada.
Third-party certification is important. You don't want to invest in projects that create more greenhouse gases than they reduce.
The rock band Coldplay said it would plant 10,000 mango trees in India to offset its energy use. But only a few hundred trees are still alive. The rest died because of lack of water and care.
Selling offsets from tree planting projects can be problematic, says the David Suzuki Foundation, because of their lack of permanence. Also, these projects don't address our dependence on fossil fuels.
You can find a link to a 44-page online publication, A Consumer's Guide to Retail Carbon Offset Providers, at the foundation's website, www.davidsuzuki.org.
Ron Dembo, the founder and chief executive of Zerofootprint, says tree planting is far cheaper than other carbon offset programs.
He's less keen on wind energy, since large-scale projects are now economically viable without extra funding from the sale of offsets.
Buyers should consider a factor called "additionality," he says. Would the project go ahead anyway? If it's business as usual, your purchase won't result in a net benefit for the climate.
Dembo's tree planting project on degraded land in Maple Ridge, B.C., meets criteria set by the International Standards Organization and the Canadian Standards Association. He's written a 175-page book, Everything You Wanted to Know About Offsetting But were Afraid to Ask, which you can download at www.zerofootprint.net (or buy for $10 at his Carbon Shop).
Carbon offsetting is a brand-new market that will take time to evolve. For now, it's buyer beware.
