hen I was a kid, I flew on a Boeing 707 from New York to Los Angeles en route to Disneyland. The roar of the turbines was deafening, and the exhaust profuse. Over the past 50 years, technical advances in aviation have increased fuel efficiency by about 70 percent, and although it continues to improve by about 1 percent each year, air travel itself is growing at nearly five times that pace.
Hydrogen is often touted as the only clean and potentially viable alternative fuel for aircraft, but don't expect to ride on a hydrogen-powered airplane anytime soon. The technology isn't there yet, and airports certainly aren't prepared to provide hydrogen fuel, says Boeing spokeswoman Mary Jean Olsen. By Olsen's estimate, flying on the wings of hydrogen won't be possible for at least 30 to 40 years. In the interim, Boeing is developing a fuel cell that will convert hydrogen into electricity and may replace backup power supplies in traditional aircraft, but Olsen says that even this isn't likely to be on the market before 2015.
Which puts me in a quandary. I live in California. My mother and sister live in New York, and the main focus of my travel writing is South Asia. To ice the cake, I run a group called Ethical Traveler. What can I, as a frequent flyer, do to balance the environmental downside of air travel? It turns out there are some real solutions, and they don't require riding a mule around the world.
"The biggest thing you can do as a consumer," says Rich Kassel, an NRDC senior attorney who served as project coordinator for its 1996 report Flying Off Course, "the only thing you can do, is to buy carbon offsets."
This was an unfamiliar term. Kassel explains that carbon offsets are environmentally beneficial actions -- like planting trees or modernizing old water heaters -- that atone for the environmental sins of our airline jaunts to Miami or Ouagadougou.
At least three Web-friendly organizations offer ways to help balance the greenhouse emissions of air travel. For $10, the nonprofit group American Forests will plant 10 tree seedlings in a damaged forest on public land. An average tree, says executive director Deborah Gangloff, can absorb some 26 pounds of carbon dioxide a year. Per acre, trees can absorb about five tons of the greenhouse gas each year, or enough to balance out one of those 80 SUVs. These numbers put some lift under my wings. American Forests, which has been around for 130 years, planted half a million trees in 2003.
Future Forests, a for-profit company based in Great Britain, has a similar strategy for making air travel "carbon neutral." Its online calculator tells me exactly how much carbon dioxide my flight from San Francisco to Shanghai will produce: 2.2 tons. I can offset those emissions by paying Future Forests to plant three trees, or to supply three energy-saving lightbulbs to a community in a developing country (the better to read flight schedules by). But Future Forests charges a little more: about $17 -- the cost of four in-flight cocktails -- for each tree or lightbulb. Nonetheless, the company is quite successful. Avis and Virgin Cars balance their carbon debt with the help of Future Forests, and the company counts as supporters celebrities and musical groups including Sting, Lenny Kravitz, Coldplay, the Foo Fighters, and Pink Floyd. There's even a Joe Strummer Memorial Forest on the Isle of Skye. What more appropriate place for an antidote to the airline industry?
The most ambitious of the lot is probably the Better World Club, which, although just two years old, aims to compete with the car-happy American Automobile Association. Like AAA, the Better World Club offers travel and car insurance (so far, only in California and Massachusetts). Better World balances emissions by retrofitting oil-burning boilers and water heaters in public schools. For club members who book tickets through Better World agents, the organization will offset two flights a year for free. Or, as a nonmember, I can pay Better World $11 to offset the noxious fumes produced by my visit to Mom's.
Okay, I've done the math (with a little help from American Forests and Edinburgh). It seems that my 30,000-mile round-the-world trip -- if I'd flown the whole way -- would have saddled my karmic scorecard with somewhere between 6.6 and 9.5 tons of carbon emissions. To my amazement, this probably would have been less harmful than the way I actually traveled: by cargo ship, hired car, tramp steamer, diesel bus, freight train, motorcycle, and horse. By way of comparison, making the trip in a midsize sedan that gets about 22 miles per gallon would have produced about 12 tons of carbon.
"A lot of people think that the minute they get on an airplane, they're doing major harm to the environment," Kassel says. Sure, they're not helping, but "the reality is, for flights longer than 500 miles, the emissions are comparable to [non-carpool] driving, and you get there a lot faster."
A real gift to the planet would have been to fly those 30,000 miles, and to pony up $20 for 20 trees. This, according to Gangloff, would have balanced my carbon debt.
The final word is hopeful, then. Not only do my long-haul flights compare favorably to driving, but I can compensate for my share of their carbon impact -- the worst evil of air travel-related pollution -- cheaply and easily. And hey, these carbon-offset outfits aren't choosy. They'll happily sell me enough trees (or fix enough boilers) to compensate for my driving emissions as well. Still, as Gary Moll of American Forests puts it, "Our vision needs to be a lot bigger than that. You can't solve all the problems of carbon by planting trees, even though it is an important step." Part of American Forests' goal, he says, is getting people to recognize that there is a problem and that something needs to be done. Until cleaner planes and cars come along, we'll have to plant an awful lot of trees to offset all our flying and driving. But it sure beats doing nothing at all, and there's still lots of room on the planet to turn grassroots efforts into forests.
