Future travel may include measuring carbon offset

By Jim Roth | Phillips Murrah P.C. | The Journal Record

[ OCTOBER 5, 2009 - OKLAHOMA CITY, OK ] - “Get your motor running, head out on the highway, looking for adventure, in whatever comes our way.”

Steppenwolf’s Born to Be Wild by Mars Bonfire

Imagine you’re preparing to take a cross-country road trip. The car’s packed, the family is loaded up in your new, energy-efficient family sedan (since you just traded in your “clunker”), and you stop at your neighborhood gas station to fuel up before you hit the road. Just as you reach to hang the nozzle back on the pump, the screen doesn’t ask if you’d like to print a receipt, but whether you would like to pay to offset your vehicle’s carbon output.

Sound futuristic?

Truth is, this sort of technology isn’t far off, and may be coming to a gas station or airport near you. Today, the San Francisco International Airport is ahead of the game. In the last few weeks, the airport has installed three self-service kiosks where passengers can enter their travel information. The kiosk then calculates the personal carbon output for the flight the passenger is about to board, and the passenger may then choose to purchase credits to offset their carbon footprint. The proceeds go directly to a redwood replanting effort in Mendocino County and a bio-diesel fueling station in San Francisco. Great idea – in that the proceeds stay local, while the intent is truly global.

It remains to be seen if such small-scale carbon offsets will catch on in the travel sector, but a better understanding of what a carbon offset actually is would be a good start. Carbon offsets are based on measures of greenhouse gas emissions, generally based on 1 metric ton. By purchasing an offset, the consumer is essentially guaranteeing the reduction of greenhouse gases by 1 metric ton. The proceeds from the offset can either go toward investing in energy generated by low-carbon emitting fuels, such as wind and natural gas, or efforts to remove carbon dioxide from the air, such as the tree-planting effort in Mendocino County. The kiosks at San Francisco International, then, calculate how much carbon is being emitted during the coming flight and divide that amount to represent a single passenger’s share. If the passenger chooses to offset his carbon output, she basically travels in a pollution neutral way.

Most domestic flights have a per-passenger greenhouse gas output of nearly 20 percent of 1 metric ton, while short international flights reach almost a full metric ton per passenger. Those figures might sound like an overwhelming amount of greenhouse gas to offset, but in reality, a short domestic flight’s carbon output can be offset with the planting of just one tree.

Even more striking is a quick comparison of a passenger’s greenhouse gas output with the emissions of the United States’ electricity generation plants. According to the Department of Energy, the U.S.’s generation capacity was responsible for, hold your breath, 2,516,580 thousand metric tons of emissions in 2007. It’s a huge, almost incomprehensible number, but it’s limited to the power generation industry. Add that number to remaining industry output, as well for each American citizen’s personal carbon footprint, and we’ve really got some numbers to worry about.

It might be easier to say that our personal carbon footprint is just a drop in the bucket compared to the power generation industry, but I think there’s a much more responsible, and inherently more American, answer. If we each commit to curb our personal environmental impacts, as well as advocate for cleaner power generation across this great country, we can collectively and drastically reduce the United States’ greenhouse gas burden. And that burden will ultimately, sooner probably than later, mean real cost risks being borne by each citizen/ratepayer for decisions made by our utilities for the past half-century.

So think about voluntary offsets the next time you board your flight or get behind the wheel. There are many online services that are legitimate and can match you with a charitable carbon offset program to mirror your philosophy and personal faith.

In case you were wondering, your midsized car is responsible for roughly 6.6 tons of carbon dioxide emissions annually if you average around 1,000 miles of driving a month. Changes we can make now give us all a better chance for years to come. Drive safe and pollution-free.

Jim Roth, a former Oklahoma corporation commissioner, is an attorney with Phillips Murrah P.C. in Oklahoma City, where his practice focuses on clean, green energy for Oklahoma.