If you must fly: purchase carbon offsets!
Do you experience carbon-guilt when making reservations to fly across the country to see your family? Is the trip absolutely necessary? If so, then purchasing carbon offsets can mitigate some of the environmental impact of your trip. Carbon offset programs should ideally remove greenhouse gases from the atmosphere through actions that would not happen otherwise (a concept known as additionality). An organization created to help people maximize their climate giving, Giving Green, recommends four carbon-offsetting programs that have strong additionality:
Tradewater (finds and destroys chemical refrigerants)
BURN (provides fuel-efficient cookstoves to people in East Africa)
Climeworks (sucks CO2 from the air, then sells it commercially or stores it underground)
Charm Industrial (converts agricultural residue into bio-oil then stores it underground)
Click here for Giving Green’s analysis of each of these companies.
Other places you might consider supporting:
Soul Sister because way to reduce carbon output is by empowering women and girls. Soul Sister does this by investing in local women entrepreneurs to start, grow and sustain successful clean energy businesses. Soul Sister has a 83% rating on Charity Navigator.
Rainforest Trust which has made a $500 Million Commitment to help ensure 30 percent of the planet is being protected and preserved in the most important places for biodiversity by 2030. The Rainforest Trust has a 100% rating on Charity Navigator.
There are a number of sites you can use to determine how much your offset should be, just do a search for ‘flight CO2 calculator’. There are also apps that you can get for your phone to do the same. These sites, of course, want you to invest in the offset that they support, but you can use the information to invest in the offset you prefer.