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[therecruit]

Ever since watching Al Gore's An Inconvenient Truth, I have been thinking about the ways my college can be more sustainable and green.

I decided that I would encourage my faculty and admin. to purchase carbon offsets when they travel to conferences and to let them know that I would reimburse them for these offsets. The process is easy and fairly affordable since when you book a flight on Expedia, the last screen you see before confirming your purchase is to Customize Your Trip. This screen features the option to “Fly Green with TerraPass” and, depending on the length of the flight, offers carbon-offset purchases that range between $5.99 for short, round-trip flights and $25.99 for long, round-trip, international flights.  This money goes to off-set the carbon emissions that occur during the travel by investing it in reforestation projects and renewable energy sources etc.

I'm just wondering, do any other deans or chairs do this?  How responsive have the faculty and the higher-ups been? 

[sciencephd]

I've never heard of it.  Expect that it will be met with considerable skepticism.

[jimbo45]

Why not a food offset for the meals that you are given during the interview? Starving people are more important than the environment, no? A sizeable donation to a food bank should suffice. How about a tree offset for the paper we use? Feel guilty yet? Sorry, but I think Al Gore's pedantic movie is yet another attempt to make us little people born  without a silver spoon feel guilty and surrender all of our decision-making to the pseudo-elites. Does Gore have a degree in the environmental sciences? No. Why should I listen to someone who can't even defeat George Bush?

[doctor_torrseal]

Carbon offsets make more sense than food offsets because (even with recent grain price increases) the supply of food is not the limiting factor in feeding everyone, it's the distribution.  While carbon dioxide really is a zero-sum issue.  I don't know how effective the carboon-offset program through Expedia actually is.  It is a serious issue for academia because lots of us do greeny things like buy local produce and drive less, and then we go fly tens of thousands of miles per year which completely wipes out any minor benefits our other actions may provide.

I have not heard of reimbursing carbon offsets, but a recent conference in my field attempted to achieve carbon neutrality through similar mechanisms.  I expect this will slowly become more common.  It's difficult to do stuff that costs extra money in academia, but the extra marginal cost isn't that high.

[donstefano]

carbon offset is one of the biggest scams ever. Some people are making s***loads of money out of it, because it is so fashionable. It basically says: it's Ok to polluite, as long as you plant some trees... But does it also help you to pollute less? probably not. Carbon offsetting is a convenient way buy off your guilt.

[sciencephd]

carbon offset is one of the biggest scams ever. Some people are making s***loads of money out of it, because it is so fashionable. It basically says: it's Ok to polluite, as long as you plant some trees... But does it also help you to pollute less? probably not. Carbon offsetting is a convenient way buy off your guilt.

That is essentially my interepretation of it.

But I think there is even another layer here, because we're talking about a  non-profit university spending money for it, as opposed to putting that money towards making the institution itself more environmentally friendly.

[dundee]

Dismissing the idea of purchasing carbon offsets simply because one doesn't like Al Gore is pathetic. Sure, there are lots of ways that we pollute the environment, but surely the solution is not to dismiss any method that may help a little, simply because it can't solve the larger problem on its own. I think we all need to do everything we can to reduce and counteract carbon emissions.

Personally, I am trying hard to reduce my own carbon footprint and am going to buy offsets for future conference travel and argue for reimbursement. There are other small, yet important, steps we can take in our departments, such as circulating memos and minutes electronically rather than on paper, encouraging our colleagues to use paperless grading methods, etc.

I hope therecruit doesn't take the posts of donstefano and jimbo45 as indicative of the level of discourse on the forums - their posts were a pretty harsh response to the first posting of a new member who seems to have good intentions and be trying to make a difference.

[doctor_torrseal]

I think there are two issues here: (1) should we worry about carbon footprints; (2) if you are worried about carbon footprints, do carbon offsets of any kind help address the problem (and the subquestion is whether the kind you buy on Expedia are helpful).  On the first question, a lot of people's minds are made up and there is always someone who will go on a rant about Al Gore.  (Although climate change was a serious topic long before Al Gore brought it to these people's attention, but I digress.)

The second question is legitimate and a tougher nut to crack.  There are good arguments on both sides: (a) that it makes a difference, and is a sort of self-imposed carbon tax; or (b) that what we need to do is reduce consumption and not think we can buy our way out of the problem.  I don't have a quick answer to this.  Then the subquestion is about whether any given carbon-offset provider is really helping or is doing a little bit of tree-planting and raking in a lot of overhead profit.  I can't answer this either, but it can be researched.

[therecruit]

Thanks everyone, especially dundee and doctor_torrse.

Just to clarify: Expedia works through Terrapass, which was founded by Dr. Karl Ulrich at the University of Pennsylvania in 2004. According to their website, "All TerraPass projects are verified by an independent accredited organization according to a published offset standard. All verifications include site visits, audits of the project data and project monitoring equipment and practices relative to the standard used."

It then notes, "Every project is conducted and verified according to one of the following appropriate standards: Voluntary Carbon Standard 2007, Green-e Climate, Chicago Climate Exchange Offset Protocols, California Climate Action Registry, EPA Climate Leaders, ISO 14064-2, and Gold Standard. TerraPass publishes the standard to be used for each project on our website when we solicit comments for new projects, and in our annual project portfolio. Every 2008 TerraPass will be fulfilled with verified emission reductions from vintage year 2008; these projects must have started operating no earlier than January 1, 2002. As we consider new projects, we publish the project name and location on our web site and invite public comments."

You can then click on their portfolio (here's the link from 2006) to see how many offsets they purchased and how much carbon they took out of the air.
http://www.terrapass.com/projects/portfolio.html

What is missing is how much money they took in and whether or not all of that money has gone into offsetting and basic admin, but it is one of the better sites I've seen in terms of transparency.

I guess what is driving this right now is that I cannot ask faculty NOT to travel for research (although I could encourage regional conferences).  In other words, I cannot force them to pollute less.  What I can do NOW and with minimal expense is offset their travel carbon emissions. 

[sciencephd]

Maybe you can let us know how it works out.