Support ReLeaf with Travel Offsets
Spring is here and the weather is slowly, slowly beginning to warm up. The rains have slacked off. Birds are flying to their summer homes.
And speaking of flying, as spring rolls into summer, many of us will be flying as well—to visit family or just explore a part of the world that’s different from our home. If you’re concerned about climate change, you probably know that air travel releases huge amounts of climate busting emissions. Many people have pledged to give up air travel as a result.
But there’s a different way to approach air travel emissions. And it’s fairly simple: buy carbon offsets for your trip.
There’s a robust debate about whether carbon offsets are an adequate compensation for our emissions. And there should be. But the carbon offsets you buy, at the least, combat climate change with such actions as forest restoration, clean energy and preserving coastal ecosystems.
And planting trees.
I recently traveled to Washington DC to visit my daughter. I wondered what my share in the carbon footprint for that trip would be. I found a website to help calculate the cost. It’s surprisingly small, since I’m one of several hundred passengers sharing the carbon burden. The website calculated my share for the round trip at about $18. Here’s the website: https://sustainabletravel.org/our-work/carbon-offsets/calculate-footprint/.
If you decide to forgo the plane trip and travel by car instead, you can also calculate your footprint for the car trip at the site.
You can find links to sites that will use your donations for carbon offsets. Or you can just find your own. ReLeaf Petaluma is in the business of planting trees — 748 trees so far, with 100 more seedlings given away — and they're just getting started! But trees cost money to buy and plant. Why not make a donation to ReLeaf the next time you fly? (Donation info here.)
If, like me, you find it hard to believe that $18 is enough to balance the emissions of a cross-country flight, you can double your donation. Or make retroactive donations to cover past flights you made before the concept of carbon offsets was envisioned. After all, we’ve been warming the planet for our entire lifetimes.
