syrinx

Excerpt from an article in the Globe's Report on Business....

I don't think flying for business or pleasure is going to go away any time soon. So in the meantime, this is one way to help balance things out!

Canadian Press

May 28, 2007 at 4:03 PM EDT

MONTREAL — — Air Canada [AC.A-T]is offering passengers a way to allay guilt about the environmental impact of air travel by paying for a carbon offset against their plane's emissions.

For an added cost — $12.80 on a Vancouver-Montreal return fare — travellers can support projects that reduce greenhouse gases. The offsets are arranged through not-for-profit organization Zerofootprint.

“By working with Zerofootprint, we will make it easy for people to calculate the impact of their journey and mitigate those effects with a small voluntary additional payment to support environmental projects that reduce greenhouse gases,” Air Canada marketing vice-president Charles McKee said Monday.

Air Canada and Jazz customers booking through aircanada.com now have an option to purchase a carbon offset for their trip. The website provides information about carbon offsets, a calculator to determine the amount of carbon dioxide a trip will generate — 800 kilograms per person on a Vancouver-Montreal return trip — and the cost to offset it, with an option to pay.

Based on the specifications of Air Canada's current aircraft, it will cost $19.20 to offset one passenger's share of carbon dioxide emissions on a return flight from Toronto to London and $12.80 between Vancouver and Montreal.

Deborah Kaplan, executive director of Zerofootprint — which offsets emissions by planting trees or through projects to prevent industrial or utility emissions — says the strategy “balances out climate-changing carbon dioxide that is put into the atmosphere by our activities, it highlights the environmental cost of goods and services we buy, and, when you offset with trees, it restores ecosystems, habitats, watersheds, greens communities and creates jobs.”

tags: emissions carbon climate ecosystem dioxide