Who doesn’t like to travel. And unless you have massive amounts of time to take the train from Buffalo, NY to San Francisco, California, you’ll probably want to take a plane.
But shit, my conscience just died inside. How do you balance being an environmental activist and doing the things you need to do, meeting the people you need to meet, going to the conferences you need to go to, training when you need to train, being trained when you need to be trained. Where is the balance? How does one sleep at night? What to do??????
Well check out TerraPass, balancing your environmental conscience and your needs as an activist. TerraPass has partnered with expedia to fund clean energy projects, one of which allows you to sponsor concrete reductions in the greenhouse gas emissions that you would generate, riding in a plane!
Also you even get a free luggage tag, which helps you find your bag with the enormous enviro-pride! Watch out world, here we come, and sustainably too!
This is a neat thing to find – people within the Challenge have been talking about the need for this kind of thing. But, I would warn against programs like this, as they currently are, for a couple reasons:
1) There is a lot of money wrapped up in these trading programs, and private corporations are looking to benefit, apparently including the anti-environmental Joyce Foundation, which has surfaced on this blog before. Believe it or not, climate exchange markets may become “larger than all the food commodities markets in the United States.”
2) Promoting these trading programs makes it easier for polluting industries to garner public recognition as environmentally-oriented, without making any actual changes to their operations. So, for example, Dupont will give some money to a carbon trading program to act as a distraction to their countless polluting facilities and their history of environmental injustices. In the end, we should work towards mandatory baseline reductions for these polluters, rather than trading operations which don’t amount to any actual reductions.
3) Climate exchange markets do not contribute to any actual reduction in greenhouse gases, it just displaces and concentrates them. Some of the actual sites for “offsets” may not even be so environmentally friendly. Take CAFOs, a big acronym on the trading market including the TerraPass program (“biomass”). CAFO stands for Confined Animal Feeding Operation, which has purely ethical and animal rights problems in itself, but also may support misleading science. CAFOs create enormous amounts of methane, a very potent greenhouse gas, so the methane can be captured and burned for heat and energy and sold as a credit on a climate exchange. There are something like 150 of these in the pipeline, and I doubt they are all quaint little family farm operations. Most end up devastating local economies, polluting waterways, and putting populations at great health risks, mainly in the South Dakota, Minnesota, North Dakota area. I fail to see how creating more CAFOs is going to slow global warming. Seriously.
4) TerraPass does not disclose answers to this information on their website. It is important to pay careful attention to words like “includes,” “like,” “one area,” etc. which are going to show us only the greenest side of what they are supporting. It’s called greenwashing and is nothing new… We should also know to be wary of the terms like “biofuels” and “biomass” – for example, biomass can include incredibly environmentally damaging practices such as burning tires, municipal waste, and sewage sludge to generate electricity or heat.”
It seems to me the only way you can be sure of greenhouse gas reductions is to do them yourself or to have someone you know do them for you. Maybe every time I catch a flight I could canvas a block with a carbon-equivalent armful of LED or compact fluorescent light bulbs? Or take the money I would spend on a TerraPass and give it to a community garden project or a community group fighting a coal plant, etc etc.
Even if I’m wrong on this stuff, it’s definitely worth looking into.
THe only bad thing is that one cannot longer trust EXPEDIA. EXPEDIA is listed in the top ripoff link at the bad business bureau ( http://www.ripoffreport.com ) and has two “dedicated” websites due to poor customer support and lies: http://www.victimsofexpedia.com and http://www.shameonexpedia.com
Kind regards