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| Counting your carbon |
March 9, 2007 |
Air travel pumps tonnes of carbon into the environment. Here’s how you can make good on your next plane trip
By Lisa Manfield
Before he immigrated to Canada in 2001, Hadi Dowlatabadi used to rack up more than 150,000 kilometres in annual air travel to conferences and workshops around the globe. But when he settled in Vancouver to teach at the Institute for Resources, Environment and Sustainability at the University of British Columbia (UBC), he was grounded as he awaited his landed immigrant status. Dowlatabadi found that, instead of cramping his style, the inability to fly had significant benefits. “I gave a lot of talks by phone and in video conferencing studios, and it worked out fine.” Not only did he save time and money, he realized he was also saving the environment by keeping his feet on the ground.
Air travel is, in fact, one of the biggest causes of carbon emissions into the atmosphere, and business travellers are big-time accumulators of air miles. According to a Future Watch report by Meeting Professionals International and American Express, the market for business travel is growing: “In 2006, the global meetings industry [was] expected to grow for a third consecutive year….” And ACCENT, a European network of more than 30 institutes working in the field of atmospheric research, reports that air transport has the highest growth rate of all transportation sectors. Unfortunately, it is also the fastest-growing source of greenhouse-gas emissions, according to Plane Stupid, a U.K. action campaign against aviation, which states that by 2050, air travel could account for 15 per cent of the world’s greenhouse gases.
In 2005, Dowlatabadi joined forces with James Tansey, an ethics and business professor at UBC, to start a non-profit carbon neutralizing company called Offsetters, which works to counteract the negative effects of carbon emissions on the environment—particularly those released by aircraft. Using the carbon calculator on the Offsetters’ Web site, travellers can tabulate the amount of carbon dioxide emitted for any specified travel itinerary. For example, a return flight from Vancouver to Toronto, a distance of about 3,400 kilometres, releases the equivalent of 0.74 tonnes or 1,631lbs of carbon dioxide per passenger. This includes carbon dioxide emissions formed by burning jet fuel plus other greenhouse emissions and ice crystals in vapour trails, which further contribute to climate change.
Carbon offsets, as sold by Offsetters and many other carbon neutralizing outfits, are credits that can be purchased online to fund projects that work to counteract the environmental footprint caused by air travel or any number of other offending practices. “We take a goodwill investment on the part of travellers and put it into worthwhile projects,” Dowlatabadi said, describing one groundbreaking project in Richmond, B.C., which will use a ground source (also known as geothermal) energy system to capture heat released from a new ice rink to warm 2,100 homes in the area and cut energy consumption, reduce homeowner energy bills and cut emissions by more than 70 per cent.
For those times when air travel is inevitable, you can now use Offsetters’ affiliate partnership with WestJet to book your flight with a planet-conscious airline. WestJet flights booked through Offsetters’ Web affiliate link include a free carbon credit. “Our affiliation with WestJet started in October and we’re getting about 1,000 clicks per month on this offer,” Dowlatabadi said, adding that WestJet has the most efficient fleet of planes in North America and they are keen to protect the environment. Absolute Travel, a firm with mostly corporate accounts, also plans to offer climate-neutral travel to its clients through Offsetters.
Offset options
While Kenneth Grey only travels cross-country two or three times a year, he believes the environmental impact truly adds up. The co-founder of Pneumatic Press Corp., a Web development company with
offices in Toronto and Vancouver, Grey decided last fall to embark upon a carbon neutralization of his entire company. He closed his Toronto office, and now all three staff work from home, eliminating their daily commute. He also moved to an electronic billing and payment system, virtually eradicating all paper usage. He remains concerned, however, about both his business trips to Vancouver and Portland, and the small company’s use of computers. “We’re only three guys, but we’ve got 12 computers running all the time.”
Grey has been looking into carbon offset options, particularly wind power offsets through The Pembina Institute, a Canadian non-profit organization that pioneers solutions to environmental issues, particularly in the energy sector. Grey plans to publish a complete report of his findings on his Web site, along with details of the company’s further reductions, with the goal of going 100 per cent carbon neutral this year. “We’re very conscious of the damage we’re doing and we don’t want to be a part of that,” he said. “We reduce and eliminate as much as possible, but what’s tricky is that there’s no one site where you can go to figure all this out.”
There are, in fact, a multitude of Web sites now selling carbon offsets for everything from air travel to household emissions. The cost of purchasing offsets varies from company to company based on the projects they fund with your money. A return flight from Vancouver to Toronto, for example, will cost you $16.28 to offset with CarbonZero, a Toronto-based outfit which puts the money toward building windmills in Alberta, retrofit lighting for low-income families in Southern Ontario and tree planting in urban and rural Canada.
Prefer to send your goodwill overseas? The Offsetters will charge you $13.79 for the same flight and will spend it on biogas digesters in India, energy efficient lighting in South Africa or efficient cooking stoves in Bangladesh.
There’s also Zerofootprint, a Toronto-based non-profit, which will perform a complete evaluation of your business to determine your emissions and customize an appropriate offset package.
All this is good news to Dowlatabadi, who said corporate employers may be in a position to lead the way in reducing carbon emissions and making an impact on the critical issue of climate change. But carbon offsets aren’t without their critics, many of whom say these easy-outs enable companies to buy the right to continue polluting. Meanwhile, supporters including Dowlatabadi say that as long as offsets aren’t viewed as a substitute to emissions-reduction initiatives, they are a positive step toward environmental stewardship. “There are tradeoffs people still aren’t making,” Dowlatabadi said, “and the best thing to do is not to travel at all.”
SIDEBARS
Definition
Biogas digester: the anaerobic digestion of organic matter to produce a gas which can then be used to generate electricity.
If hopping on a plane is the only option
The complete elimination of business travel may not be possible for your company, but there are a number of actions that can reduce your environmental impact.
- Be aware of the emissions your air travel and other business activities create. Use an online calculator to tally your results, then see if you can reduce your offsets by limiting the number of flights you take each year.
- Support airlines that include environmental responsibility in their corporate philosophy.
- Use virtual collaboration technology whenever possible.
- Travel by rail rather than shirttail flights when distance and time permit.
- Purchase carbon offsets when you must fly.
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