Case in point: this autumn, I'll move somewhere to begin graduate school, and I think it's important to see the schools and their surrounding areas before making the decision of where to go. I love road trips, so my first thought was to go by car. But that struck me as a lot of fuel to use up for one person.
My next thought was trains. I love long train trips, which often pass through amazingly beautiful places that you can't get to on roads. But after spending some time on Amtrak.com, I found that the trains are longer than I had thought--the longest would be about a 72 hour trip. Yikes!
So then I checked planes, which turned out to be the fastest and cheapest option by far. Definitely not as fun as trains, but when you can pay $200 (not including food) for 72 hours on a train or $110 for 6 hours on a plane, it's tough to choose the train.
But aren't planes terrible for the environment? I wanted to know what my carbon footprint would be with these various forms of transportation.
I ended up at CarbonFootprint.com, where I was able to calculate the carbon footprint of my potential itineraries. (They state that their US data comes from the Environmental Protection Agency and the Department of Energy.)
Here was the breakdown of doing the trip by:
Train = 1.06 tonnes of CO2
Plane = 1.14 tonnes of CO2
Car = 3.66 tonnes of CO2
I was a little bit surprised by how much worse car is than the others (though it wouldn't be so bad if I wasn't going solo). But what really surprised me most was that plane and train were so similar. I've always thought of trains as being much better, but apparently they're only a little better.
Looking at these numbers, I think I'll probably take two planes and a train. But that will still leave me producing about 1.16* tonnes of CO2. What about that? (*This is higher than the 1.14 above, because the train I'll take, Denver to Seattle, is actually slightly more carbon than the same route by plane, because it goes all the way west to Sacramento before going north.)
I originally went to CarbonFootprint.com to calculate my carbon emissions, but it turned out that their main function is selling carbon offsets. "Carbon offset" means that I donate to an organization whose activities will reduce CO2 by roughly the same amount that my activities have increased CO2. The idea behind this is to generate funding for organizations that are doing good things for the environment and to create a market for carbon offsets that will provide a financial incentive for companies to lower their CO2 emissions.
So my 1.16 tonnes of CO2 have been offset by $14.84 given to an organization that is planting Maya Nut trees to reforest parts of Central America. Pretty neat.
Btw, in case you, like me, have an inner cynic, and wonder how we can know that the $14.84 will actually go towards planting trees, it seems there are efforts underway to regulate the carbon offset industry. For example, the British government has started a program to oversee and certify carbon offsetters, the Quality Assurance Scheme for Carbon Offsetting, and CarbonOffset.com is one of the first to receive approval. For more on purchasing carbon offsets, check out this great wiki: How to Buy a Carbon Offset.
The idea of carbon offsets is relatively new, and nobody really knows yet if it will work. There are certainly strong opinions on both sides of the matter. The Wikipedia entry on the subject gives a good overview: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Carbon_offsets.
For my part, I like this first experience. It's something of an easing of my conscience for the emissions of my travel, which is kind of selfish, but it also invests money in what are hopefully good projects. And it provides incentive for us to be more aware of how our actions emit CO2 and to do something positive about it.
If you want to give it a try, here's the flight portion of the carbon calculator from CarbonFootprint.com. The full version is here.
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