Carbon Neutral: Raising the Ante on Eco-Tourism

NY Times
December 10, 2006

By MICHELLE HIGGINS

SUDDENLY it’s not enough to be green. Now truly eco-conscious travelers are also carbon neutral.

The term, which will be added to the New Oxford American Dictionary in 2007, describes a balance between polluting and enhancing the environment, especially in terms of harmful greenhouse gases. Its use is perhaps nowhere more prevalent than in the travel industry, where eco-tourism has been steadily gaining momentum over the years, and travelers — who are already booking eco-friendly lodging, renting hybrid cars and reusing the towels in their hotel rooms — are looking for ways to further reduce their impact on the environment.

For travelers, becoming carbon neutral involves calculating their “carbon footprint,” the approximate amount of carbon dioxide produced on flights, road trips or when they otherwise burn fossil fuels, and then buying “offsets” — donating money for projects that promise to produce energy without burning fossil fuels or otherwise reduce the production of greenhouse gases.

The reduction purchased is supposed to equal the amount of carbon dioxide the trip created, per passenger. The ultimate goal: a carbon neutral trip.

Increasingly, tour operators are buying carbon offsets to compensate for the amount of carbon dioxide produced on trips. REI Adventures announced a Carbon-Neutral Travel program in October. Beginning next year, the company will buy renewable energy credits from the Bonneville Environmental Foundation to offset the carbon dioxide produced by each traveler’s flight and ground transportation. The credits, called Green Tags, will support solar, wind and other renewable energy projects.

Ecoventura, an adventure company in the Galápagos Islands, says it has “achieved CarbonNeutral status” on its Web site, www.ecoventura.com. Working with the CarbonNeutral Company, Ecoventura is trying to balance the CO2 created through its trips by donating to a portfolio of projects, including sustainable energy projects in Sri Lanka and India, and methane recovery in the United States, which captures leaking methane at a Pennsylvania coal mine.

Ski resorts from Vail, Colo., to Stratton, Vt., are getting into the act by buying renewable energy credits to offset their electricity consumption. The credits purchased by the ski resorts support the production of clean electricity generated by wind farms or other sustainable sources rather than fossil fuels like coal and gas.

It’s a way for eco-friendly travel companies to practice what they preach. Carbon offsets “address the inherent dilemma of our programs being all about sustainability, but also having students fly around the world,” said Daniel Greenberg, executive director of Living Routes, a study-abroad company that runs sustainability education programs in eco-villages around the world and started its own carbon offset program last year.

Individual travelers can get into the mix by going to one of several carbon-offset Web sites, like www.carbonoffsets.org or www.terrapass.com, and using an online “carbon calculator” to determine the approximate amount of carbon dioxide produced when they travel. Carbon offsets, usually anywhere from $5 to $30, depending on the length of the trip and the form of transportation, can be purchased through a growing number of travel companies.

Expedia and Travelocity both rolled out new programs this year that let travelers buy carbon offsets. Travelers who buy offsets through Expedia and its partner TerraPass, a Web-based for-profit company in Menlo Park, Calif., for a medium or long-haul flight get a “Carbon Balanced Flyer” luggage tag. The charge is $5.99 to offset about 1,000 pounds of carbon dioxide — the amount emitted, per passenger, on a round-trip flight of up to 2,200 miles; $16.99 for a cross-country flight of up to 6,500 miles; and $29.99 for an international flight of up to 13,000 miles.

It is unclear how much impact these programs actually have on climate change — or whether they function mostly as a way for travelers to justify the amount of pollution they generate on trips. Still, many travelers see carbon offsetting as a way to help tackle global warming without having to give up that trip to the Bahamas.