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What is a Carbon Offset?

I have been planning a big family trip to Maui, Hawaii. Laurie and I are excited about letting our family of five see the grandeur of the ocean, swimming, snorkeling, riding bikes in nature's beauty.
Only very recently I had run a Carbon Footprint calculator from the internet and came up with a rough number on pounds of Carbon Dioxide (CO2) that my family produces. I was shocked and dismayed to find out that five round-trip tickets to the islands would increase this year's carbon footprint by approximately 30%. Wholly crap! We are trying to be responsible citizens of the earth...If we really want to go, what can we do about this?
Luckily there is a way to even up the score on our Carbon Footprint. It is called a Carbon Offset. My understanding of a Carbon Offset was to pay someone else to take the carbon that my family emitted into the atmosphere back out of the atmosphere. I pictured a company planting a certain number of trees that would vacuum out the carbon I put there. In reality, it normally doesn't work that way.
We decided to go with www.terrapass.com. TerraPass is a company from the Bay Area that has a good name in the Carbon Offset business. In otherwords, they are not a scam. As you can imagine, it would be (and is) easy for scam artists to cheat a well meaning person out of money. So 'buyer beware". TerraPass has a list of businesses that it has partnered with to reduce CO2 in the world. Interestingly, their primary focus currently seems to be catching methane gas from dairies and landfills, and using that captured gas to make clean electric power and fertilizer. And from the list they have, the beneficiaries are you and I right here in the valley. Awesome! So they aren't necessarily planting trees on my behalf, but they are reducing greenhouse gas emissions.
So we are still going to Maui. Our cost for the offset is only $47. I feel better about our impact. I even found a rental car place on the island that has carbon-neutral biodiesel rental cars. Maybe this stuff is catching on...

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Comment by Mark Royce on April 27, 2009 at 12:01pm: Thanks for sharing this story Pete!
It has helped me in my understanding a little more the whole Carbon Offset thing.

It's not easy being green! ... (yes, you're supposed to sing that)

Comment by Tom Cotter on April 27, 2009 at 3:22pm: I just picked one up for our airline travel this year. I bought 8,000 lbs of CO2 offset at TerraPass for $47 also.

Where my money went:
My money went to support clean energy and other projects that reduce greenhouse gas emissions. My offset portfolio consists of a mix of clean energy, farm power and landfill gas capture.

Clean energy
When a wind farm generates power, it displaces electricity generated by conventional sources such as coal and natural gas. Those conventional sources produce carbon dioxide emissions because they burn fossil fuels to spin their turbines, whereas wind farms don't use fossil fuels at all. They're virtually carbon-free!

Farm power
My money helps farmers capture and destroy the methane, a powerful global warming gas which forms when managing animal waste. It supports the installation and operation of anaerobic digesters, lagoon covers, and electricity generators.

Landfill gas capture
The trash we bury in landfills decomposes slowly, producing methane which escapes into the atmosphere. Methane is a powerful greenhouse gas - about 21 times as powerful as carbon dioxide - so projects which capture and destroy that gas are of great benefit to the climate. These projects capture the methane from landfills using wells, pipes, caps, blowers and other technology; and destroy the gas by burning it in a flare.

Comment by Sally Carroll on May 3, 2009 at 9:03am: I bought our first carbon offsets this year, too. We rarely fly, because I dislike the experience, but we wanted to visit my son in Baltimore. As we flew we could see other planes -- spewing long black plumes of exhaust! Multiply that by thousands of flights a day.