Carbon Offsets Take Flight

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"With trees, your offsets are at the whim of nature and that's pretty questionable since we're having this conversation because of climate change," says Bill Burtis, manager of communications and special projects at Portsmouth (N.H.)-based Clean Air-Cool Planet, a nonprofit that advises corporations, communities, and campuses on ways to reduce greenhouse gas emissions.

Burtis and other critics also wonder about the point of offsets. They say offsets are like buying environmental indulgences for someone's supposed eco-damaging sins. Doing so doesn't lead to any change in behavior, which is what environmentalists would prefer to see. "We want to see people try to reduce energy first in how they live and then think about offsets," says Burtis. He says the same people who are concerned about the environment and buy an offset for a plane ticket would affect far more change by reducing the size of their houses, refrigerators, or cars.

At Home vs. Away

Of course, the point of many of these offset programs is one of convenience—it is, after all, much easier to click a mouse button and donate some money than to go without that SUV or recreation room. In a world that has become increasingly globalized, travel is hardly likely to decrease, no matter how guilty travelers feel about it. The World Travel & Tourism Council has seen international travel grow in recent years at a 6% annual clip, which is a faster pace than the 4% pace of growth in the 1990s.

Typically, the airline offset programs provide a Web calculator that estimates a traveler's carbon dioxide emissions from the flights they book. They use a formula that takes into account the distance traveled and how much fuel is burned during that flight, which determines the amount of carbon emitted. (Of course, different airlines have aircraft fleets that are old or new, so different airlines emit varying amounts of carbon for the same route.) The airlines offer passengers the option to buy offsets from environmental groups the airlines have signed as partners. At Continental, that's the nonprofit Sustainable Travel International.

Continental says it conducted a third-party review before deciding to partner with Sustainable Travel. "We were also attracted by the variety of projects we could offer our customers—since our European customers preferred to fund projects in developing countries while our American passengers wanted to contribute to projects in their own backyard," says Continental's Raney.

Gogoi is a contributing writer for BusinessWeek.com.