| Sourced From Stltoday.com |
In 2002 Responsible Travel became one of the first travel companies to offer customers the option of buying so-called carbon offsets to counter the planet-warming emissions generated by their airline flights.
But in October, Responsible Travel canceled the program, saying that while it might help travelers feel virtuous, it was not helping to reduce global emissions. In fact, company officials said, it might even encourage some people to travel or consume more.
“The carbon offset has become this magic pill, a kind of get-out-of-jail-free card,” said Justin Francis, the managing director of Responsible Travel. “It’s seductive to the consumer who says, ‘It’s $4 and I’m carbon-neutral, so I can fly all I want.”‘
Offsets, he argues, are distracting people from making more significant behavioral changes, like flying less.
The purchase of carbon offsets is supposed to cancel out the emissions generated by activities like flying or heating office buildings by directing money to programs that reduce emissions elsewhere, like tree-planting in Africa or a hydropower project in Brazil. An airline passenger might volunteer to pay $5 to $40 to offset his flight, with the price linked to distance.
Offsets have played a growing role in the greening of travel because carbon dioxide emissions from airplanes are growing so quickly and there is currently no technological fix that would drastically lower them.
In America, many hotels and airlines have embraced such programs in the last year or two. Globally, offset programs have grown into a multimillion-dollar industry.
But it has proved difficult to monitor or quantify the emissions-reducing potential of the thousands of green projects financed by customers’ payments, and there are no industrywide standards.
Some leading experts on the emissions issue have reviewed and rejected purchasing offsets for air travel. And some experts say that emissions from airline travel are simply so large that it may be impossible to offset them.
“Buying offsets is a nice idea, just like giving money to a soup kitchen is a nice idea, but that doesn’t end world hunger,” said Anja Kollmuss, a staff scientist for the Stockholm Environment Institute who is based at a branch at Tufts University.
“Buying offsets won’t solve the problem, because flying around the way we do is simply unsustainable,” said Kollmuss, who has researched airline offsets.
BY ELISABETH ROSENTHAL
NEW YORK TIMES
