Green travel ideas from two environmentally conscious travelers

The 2010 Winter Olympics gets underway in Vancouver in a few hours on Feb 12, and VANOC - the organizing commitee, has gone to great lengths to ensure the event is as green as can be.

The Vancouver Olympics will have a 15% smaller carbon footprint than normal. They built venues which live up to LEED standards, and they’re encouraging use of public transportation. Like the Eco-Ironman, 100% carbon neutral athletes are participating in the Games.

It’s the greenest ever, actually, as Olympic events go. But how green is that? Newsweek gets it perfectly right in this one line - “calling the Games the “greenest ever” might lead one to believe that the net effect will be similar to planting thousands of acres of Amazonian rainforest.”

Inspite of VANOC’s admirable efforts, the Games will still produce 268,000 tons of carbon emissions - 150,000 of which is directly attributable to travel. Thousands of people have already flown in and are living in hotels in Vancouver.

So VANOC got itself an official carbon offset sponsor - Offsetters, to balance the 118,000 tons of emissions caused by VANOC operations. This still does not include the 150,000 tons from travel.

Offsetters does have a voluntary offset program where travelers can calculate and offset their own share of the event’s footprint.

The New Oxford American Dictionary’s word of the year for 2006 was “carbon-neutral,” which gives you some sense of the fad that is carbon offsets. With the success of Al Gore’s An Inconvenient Truth, there is a rising wave of guilt about the carbon dioxide that we each produce in the course of our daily lives, and carbon offsets gave us a way to erase that CO₂ along with the guilt. “Carbon-neutral” is just a cooler, sexier, trendier way of communicating the same “guilt-free” consumer mentality that American culture is known for – e.g. “fat-free,” “low-cal,” etc.Well, the truth is, carbon offsets like those that TerraPass sells are a lot more complicated than all that. The principle behind an offset is that to compensate for your own carbon dioxide emissions, you buy a share in a project that is actively reducing carbon emissions somewhere in the world – including renewable energy projects, reforestation schemes, bio fuel production, and anything else that might be a carbon sink or prevent carbon dioxide from entering the atmosphere. We recognize the value of these carbon offsets while also acknowledging their limitations:

Carbon Offset Pros:

• In cases where emissions are inevitable, offsets provide a way to do something to remediate the effects.
• Offsets are a source of investment for renewable energy and other projects to mitigate climate change, therefore filling the void that some governments have left by not stepping in to regulate and/or limit carbon dioxide emissions.
• In many cases, offsets are a catalyst for change in the developing world, where renewable energy projects funded by the developed world could be the basis of a sustainable growth and development curve going forward.

Carbon Offset Cons:

• Buying offsets makes people feel that it’s okay to pollute if they simply compensate for their actions by buying credits.
• Offsets are unlikely to be as effective and permanent in removing carbon dioxide from the atmosphere as we are in emitting the carbon dioxide to begin with.
• The industry is almost completely unregulated and therefore largely not held accountable for the emissions promises it makes.

Our Bottom Line: Although we support the idea of purchasing offsets from a reputable company to mitigate inevitable carbon emissions, we think that the term “carbon-neutral” is misleading, because it lends too much credit to the effectiveness of the nascent carbon offset industry. It also takes attention away from non-global warming related environmental issues and what we can do individually to reduce our impact and need for offsets. Carbon offsets should be used in combination with the other environmentally responsible travel practices like selecting an environmentally-friendly hotel or choosing an environmentally-friendly destination, not as an indulgence that can be bought to pardon all of our environmental sins.