Offsetting Your Flights

I realize that most of us are not flying much these days, but I am confident that we will return to flying when the pandemic is over and when we do, we should offset the carbon footprints of our flights. The Gotham Gal and I have been doing this for the last five years.

Here are two good ways to do that:

Project Wren – this is a USV portfolio company and with their Flight Logger you can log all of your flights and offset them with afforestation programs.

Delta Offsets – Delta Airlines offers a service where you can calculate the carbon footprint of your flight and offset it with a number of projects.

It is not particularly expensive to offset your flights. A round trip flight from JFK to LAX and back is 0.7 tons of carbon per passenger and you can generally offset for around $10 a ton. So using that math, it would be $7 to offset the carbon for your round trip from NYC to LA and back.

The harder part is making this a regular occurrence. Some airlines and travel agents will automatically offset if you ask them to. I hope that becomes more common and available as it is the easiest way to do this.