One of the reasons for the recent silence here in the Vertography blog has been a short trip we took back home to the UK. While there, we also took a side trip down to the beautiful city of Venice, in Italy, for a few days. As a result, we booked two return flights: one between San Francisco and London, and one between London and Venice.

When booking the trans-Atlantic flight, on United Airlines, we were offered the choice to pay for upgrades and given links to partners for booking cars and hotels, but nothing more. When we booked the Venice flights with EasyJet, a UK based low cost carrier, right there on the booking page, in addition to other offers, we were offered the option to buy carbon offsets for our flight.

Carbon Offsets?
What are carbon offsets? How much are they? Do they do any good? And, if they do, why don’t US airlines like United offer customers a chance to buy them too?

Essentially, a carbon offset scheme is a financial mechanism allowing you to buy credits in a project designed to reduce greenhouse gas emissions to offset the emissions associated with an action you take. In the case of our flight from London to Venice, easyJet calculates that we contributed 102kg each way, per person. And the cost to offset that via easyJet’s UN certified emission reduction projects is just £1.33 (about $2.45) each way, per person.

Obviously, given that every airline we looked at booking the flights within Europe with offered them, there is a widely held belief that they work in some way. Some would argue they just allow people (or companies) to continue generating greenhouse gas emissions, but erase any guilt they have about it. Some are concerned that the amount of emissions the projects receiving the money can reduce is hard to quantify, so does the money really cover the emissions from the flight?

More pragmatic people seem to believe that if people at least feel guilty enough to contribute to a carbon reduction project voluntarily at the checkout, that in itself is progress!

Why did United not offer them for the trans-Atlantic segment of our trip? Well, it looks like they’re getting there, but just haven’t finalised the plans. Other US airlines do have plans, or are working on getting them set up as well, so expect to see the option to buy carbon offsets when booking a flight in the US soon too.

Should You Buy Them?
I look at this somewhat pragmatically. You can choose to not fly somewhere, but realistically there are few other ways to travel long distances. Buying carbon offsets for your flight seems like the next best thing to me (and, yes, we did buy them for the Venice trip).

Independent Carbon Offsets
Since the trip, I’ve also discovered that you can buy carbon offsets for your flight from a third party like the Carbon Neutral Company. I just used their calculator to work out an estimate of the emissions for our San Francisco to London flight: around 4000kg for two people on round trips. That would cost between £30 ($55) and £60 ($110) depending on the type of project being contributed to - the Carbon Neutral Company lets you choose.

Tags: airline, carbon neutral, carbon offset, flight

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