Fly less?

Earlier today I put up a post on Twitter asking for suggestions about places to donate money in bulk to counter the carbon emitted due to my travels.

One suggestion came from @SFriedScientist:

TerraPass is pretty good, founded by a Duke alum and has some decent people on their advisory panel http://www.terrapass.com

So I checked out TerraPass, and it seems like a pretty slick operation. Basically they spend the money you give them on projects that wouldn’t happen otherwise, resulting in reclaiming or avoiding emissions (landfill projects seem popular this year).

TerraPass has a handy calculator for your family’s entire carbon output.

So, I entered our two cars, the cost of our home’s utilities, and an estimate of the number of flights we take each year (8 medium, and 4 long round trips). Here are the results:

Whew! That’s a fair chunk of change — but when you consider that you’re covering all the carbon a family of four is responsible for generating in a year, in some ways it’s not so bad.

Still, not necessarily the investment one takes lightly, especially since in the grand scheme of things it probably won’t make much of a difference. Sure, I’ll feel a little less guilty about all that flying (and heating and air conditioning), but if everyone else on the planet isn’t doing the same thing, global warming is still going to happen.

Then I got this comment from @imascientist:

Err, fly less?

Right. Paying $300 a year, which few others are willing to do, isn’t going far enough to solve the problem, and instead I should simply not fly.

I could do that, I suppose. I was planning on traveling to a conference in San Francisco for my job next month, but my boss would probably understand that I’d rather “save the environment.” I was planning a vacation this summer, but why should I do that when the fate of the world is at stake?

Now, I realize that people like me, with their cars and houses and plane travel, are responsible for a disproportionate share of the problem of global warming. But it’s not clear to me that just “flying less” is going to help any more than paying for carbon mitigation. If I pay for carbon offsets, money gets invested in preserving the environment, demonstrating that a carbon-neutral society is economically viable. If I just don’t fly, I’m not convinced that the world will be better off. Proportionally, that will get noticed less than contributing to the success of a carbon offset company.

But neither “solution” is going to get anywhere near solving the problem. For the problem to get solved, the world has to come together. I just happen to think that’s more likely to occur if companies like TerraPass are thriving.