Carbon Neutral: The New Way to Fly
Sam Kuttner
Issue date: 9/11/07 Section: Science
Whether traveling to visit a friend studying abroad in London this semester or flying home to California just for the weekend, seasoned travelers take many things into consideration when planning their trips.
They check and re-check flight schedules, ticket prices and in-flight accommodations before booking business or pleasure trips. Regular travelers check their frequent flier miles incessantly, ensuring that every mile traveled is logged. But even the most seasoned passengers forget to add one more item to the total price of their travel -- the environmental cost.
Those travelers often associate carbon emissions mainly with automobiles, but because airplanes use thousands of gallons of fuel per flight, the airplanes that criscross the United States daily are big contributors to the amount of carbon dioxide in the air and, consequently, global warming. In hopes of mitigating the effect of air travel-produced carbon emissions on the atmosphere, environmental groups are partnering with air travel companies to reduce the carbon footprints left by weary travelers.
Expedia and TerraPass, Delta Airlines and The Conservation Fund's Go Zero and Continental Airlines and Sustainable Travel International are trying out new green partnerships, encouraging customers to give monetary donations to offset carbon emissions from air travel.
THE DAMAGE DONE
"The amount of carbon produced by air travel is higher than any other form of travel -- for every passenger mile you travel, you produce about 1.25 lbs of carbon dioxide," said Megan Epler-Wood, president and founder of The International Ecotourism Society, an organization that works to unite communities with conservation and sustainable travel.
She said although many people know that such an intense release of fossil fuels into the atmosphere has profound effects on the earth, and even with the near-ubiquitous success of the popular global warming awareness film An Inconvenient Truth, many fail to understand fully America's contribution to the world's environmental problems. Consumers do not know how to decrease their own carbon impact, Epler-Wood said.
They check and re-check flight schedules, ticket prices and in-flight accommodations before booking business or pleasure trips. Regular travelers check their frequent flier miles incessantly, ensuring that every mile traveled is logged. But even the most seasoned passengers forget to add one more item to the total price of their travel -- the environmental cost.
Those travelers often associate carbon emissions mainly with automobiles, but because airplanes use thousands of gallons of fuel per flight, the airplanes that criscross the United States daily are big contributors to the amount of carbon dioxide in the air and, consequently, global warming. In hopes of mitigating the effect of air travel-produced carbon emissions on the atmosphere, environmental groups are partnering with air travel companies to reduce the carbon footprints left by weary travelers.
Expedia and TerraPass, Delta Airlines and The Conservation Fund's Go Zero and Continental Airlines and Sustainable Travel International are trying out new green partnerships, encouraging customers to give monetary donations to offset carbon emissions from air travel.
THE DAMAGE DONE
"The amount of carbon produced by air travel is higher than any other form of travel -- for every passenger mile you travel, you produce about 1.25 lbs of carbon dioxide," said Megan Epler-Wood, president and founder of The International Ecotourism Society, an organization that works to unite communities with conservation and sustainable travel.
She said although many people know that such an intense release of fossil fuels into the atmosphere has profound effects on the earth, and even with the near-ubiquitous success of the popular global warming awareness film An Inconvenient Truth, many fail to understand fully America's contribution to the world's environmental problems. Consumers do not know how to decrease their own carbon impact, Epler-Wood said.