Green travel ideas from two environmentally conscious travelers

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.

Before I get to the substance of my post, I want to remind our readers that today is Blog Action Day, an annual event when thousands of bloggers get together to weigh in on the same topic. This year, the topic is the environment. Well done, selection committee! We’re all too happy to participate.

OK, so now let me explain my post title. I was intrigued a couple of weeks ago to see that Ecuador had used the Clinton Global Initiative as a forum to announce their plans NOT to drill for one billion barrels of proven oil reserves in Yasuni National Park in the Ecuadorian Amazon.

The announcement was a fascinating and quite unexpected commitment from a country that could really use those oil dollars. President Correa of Ecuador announced that they would commit investment to renewable energy instead, and then the last sentence of the press release reads: “The plan also includes promotion of ecotourism and sustainable development for Ecuador’s Amazonian region.”

I have two reactions to this:

1) Wow. If Ecuador, a country that has a per capita income of 4,500 can look past it’s immediate economic needs and toward a more sustainable long-term growth model, why can’t we do the same thing in the U.S. - where per-capita wealth is more than 10 times larger? I mean, seriously!

2) More importantly, I think this story is all about travel, and the press release buried the lede. Ecuador sees an opportunity to expand on its already substantial ecotourism business and become the Costa Rica of South America with both a strong nature-based tourism draw and a significant portfolio of renewable energy. And to get back to my creative terminology, this is the “sticky green residue” left behind by all of those tourists who visited the Galapagos recently. I say “sticky,” because all those tourist dollars spent in Ecuador over the years have lodged in the mind of government officials and made them realize that they have too much to lose if they permit drilling to go forward.

Here’s a concrete example of how travel can make a net positive impact on the world’s environment.

So don’t be ashamed for taking that overseas trip. Find those “simple green choices” that you can make to reduce your travel’s environmental impact, but also take heart that you could be doing the world a lot of good by making other countries appreciate the power of the tourist dollar. That might just be the incentive they need to conserve their natural resources.

Disagree with me about Ecuador’s oil or the benefits of tourism? Leave a comment below or send us an e-mail at simplegreenchoices@gmail.com.

So you’re planning a trip to Europe over the winter holidays, and you want to make sure you don’t have to cash out any of your 401K to do so (ouch!). Well, obviously a good idea might be to whip out an Excel spreadsheet and plan out a line item budget of your trip. Line items might include:

• Airfare
• Car Rental
• Accommodations
• Meals
• Entertainment
• Miscellaneous/Incidentals

Such an exercise is a great way to get you thinking about your budget and the costs that each part of your trip will incur. Of course, your travel won’t just incur monetary costs. There are environmental costs, as well, which aren’t necessarily factored into the prices you pay for your hotel stay, your meals, and your flight overseas. The line items for your environmental travel budget look like the following:

• Carbon dioxide emissions (from air travel, car travel, other transportation, and electricity use, see TerraPass for a breakdown of emissions)
• Other emissions from electricity generation and transportation (methane, sulfur dioxide, and particulates)
• Solid waste (including organic matter and recyclable materials)
• Water pollution (particularly if you travel to a developing world country, where your waste might end up in surface water)
• Deforestation (if the food you eat has been sourced from a farmer or rancher who practices slash-and-burn practices)

Unfortunately, we are so insulated from these costs that it’s difficult to assign them a value on our spreadsheet. Only with carbon emissions can we assign a real value and pay for those costs through a carbon offset program.

It’s these hidden environmental costs that inspired SimpleGreenChoices. As we continue on through the coming weeks and months, we will continue to show you many different ways that you can manage your environmental travel budget while still having the trip of a lifetime.