Flying Greener

I've never flown before. Never ever. And I'll admit that our upcoming flight to San Francisco might terrify me a bit. Alright, I'm lying. It terrifies me a lot.

Because of my fear of flying I really wanted to take a train or drive or hang-glide or be transported by UFO to California. However, for entirely logical reasons (takes too long, don't know how to hang-glide, the aliens didn't return our phone calls) Dan shot down all of those ideas. So we booked the flight.

As soon as the confirmation arrived in our inbox I felt a stab of terror in my gut and a jab of guilt in my heart. Flying is not good for the environment. Oftentimes it's inevitable (as in this case) but shouldn't we still do something to offset our impact?

Yes! We found the following resources:

TerraPass

Carbonfund

Sustainable Travel International

All of these offer a small "quiz" of sorts that details either your personal or your business's carbon footprint [Carbon Footprint: a measure of the amount of the greenhouse gas carbon dioxide is produced by a person, organization, or location at a given time].

Once you know your footprint, you pay a monetary "offset" that is donated to various green organizations and environmental projects that work to reduce greenhouse gas emissions from other sources.

For example (via TerraPass):

(Click to enlarge)

You can see here that our flight emits almost 5,000lbs of CO2. Bleh.

That's equivalent to driving a 2007 Honda Civic Hybrid 10,000 miles. In other words, in the 12 or so hours we spend on a plane, we'll create as much atmosphere warming gas as a hybrid car might in a year.

The good news is that this is very easy to remedy. Just click the "skip to results" button and you'll see something like this:

For only $30 we can feel better about flying and know that our offset is going towards helpful projects like these.

It's that easy! And it's such an affordable thing that Dan and I are even considering adding the miles we put on our rental car to the tally.

For now, though, I'm off to do some more trip research. I just found out from my handy-dandy Time Out*** guide that parking is something of an art in San Francisco. I guess on-street parking is quite rare, so it looks like we'll be relying on parking garages on most days. I'd hate to be without one when we're running late for a show, so my next project is to plot them all on a map. Believe it or not, I'm excited to do this. I am weird.

With Love,
~Brande N.

***Side Note: I am slowly but surely falling in love with my Time Out guide. Maps, events, attractions, prices, address, phone numbers, hours, and some very frank reviews make for fun an informative reading. I'd absolutely recommend it if you're looking for a great pocket-sized guide to any city!