I often travel to Stockholm through Eindhoven, as it is quite accessible from Brussels and also has Ryanair connections. Eindhoven Airport is really working hard on their green image, with everything from onsite carbon offsetting to collecting and reusing rain water to flush toilets. The carbon offsetting caught my attention this time, and I played around with the machines that they had put up that allows you to calculate and offset your emissions.
I have read and heard a lot about carbon offsetting, and being a person who aspires to be an asset for the planet rather than a burden, I figured it would be interesting to give it try. However I wasn’t ready to simply trust the machine at the airport but rather I wanted to be a conscious shopper in the field of carbon.
So, I set out to compare and try to understand the market for consumer offsetting.
Now, carbon offsetting as a concept can be challenged in many ways that I won’t discuss right now here. My opinion is that I think the most important part of this is to start pricing carbon into your life. Currently, unless you’re a corporation in one sector covered by an emission cap-and-trade scheme, carbon is free of cost. The idea is that if you start pricing your carbon emissions, this will create a real incentive to start cutting them (unless you adopt a “pay and forget” attitude AND unless the price is too low, more on that later).
I compared ten different carbon offsetting services that are open to consumers on a trip from Brussels (where I live) to Stockholm (where I come from) and I will try over the next couple of posts to figure out how to ensure that you do carbon offsetting right.
How much carbon?
When trying to figure out how to offset your emissions you are first struck with the challenge of how much you actually emit. There are countless calculators out there, however they can really differ in the way that they calculate the distance. The most naive way (which also leads to shortest distance) would be to simply calculate a straight line from point A to point B. Of course this doesn’t really get the right result as the Earth is certainly not flat and airplanes certainly don’t fly completely straight.
A calculator should take into account the curvature of the earth as well as how the airplanes fly. The curvature is a simple formula that you need to incorporate into the calculator. The part about airplanes is harder, since the exact route taken might vary from flight to flight – additionally domestic flights will have a higher carbon emission per passenger than mid or long range ones (as the main emissions are during take off and landing). Furthermore releasing greenhouse gases into the atmosphere has a larger impact than on the ground, which is another effect that has to be taken into account.
All in all, you should make sure that the calculator you are using takes this into account.
Case in point: for my trip from Brussels to Stockholm, I got such varying estimates from 0.28 tonnes (www.carbonpassport.com) to 0.63 tonnes (www.nativenergy.com). The average was 0.49 tonnes and the median 0.52 tonnes, and I would tend to go for the higher estimate of 0.5 tonnes and use this as my basis.
For the spreadsheet I used to compare providers, you can see it here.
6 responses so far ↓
Planting trees or building power plants? « Bridgebuilding // September 20, 2008 at 11:07 am |
[...] About me ← Making my carbon offset count – which provider to choose? [...]
Tora // September 23, 2008 at 9:09 am |
Hey Linus! I fly from Einhoven too, because I am in Maastricht now. So, after this investigation, would you say that the machines on that airport are a good option to offset the carbon? It’s interesting to know…
How much for a tonne of carbon? « Bridgebuilding // September 23, 2008 at 11:01 am |
[...] third post on how to carbon offset a trip from Brussels to Stockholm. In the first one I dealt with how much carbon to offset and in the second which type of offsetting to do. This post explores how much to pay for [...]
linuskendall // September 23, 2008 at 11:05 am |
Hey Tora! Thanks for stopping by
I think they are too cheap, if you check my post on “How much to pay” I believe that a price of between €15 and €30 seems reasonable. Greenseat who operates those machines in Eindhoven charges €8.33 per tonne. That it is too cheap leads me to think that some or all of their carbon offsetting projects won’t have the effect that they advertise.
Hope I’ll bump into you someday in Eindhoven
Linus
benjahedley // September 25, 2008 at 11:23 am |
Linus,
I really liked your post here on carbon offsetting and the pitfalls of calculating flights. Can I help out with a couple of your questions on carbon offsetting calculation as I design carbon calculators for Clear Offset (www.clear-offset.com) based on DEFRA’s figures (The British Government’s Department for Environment, Food and Rural Affairs).
For flight calculators there are 5 things to consider as you spotted:
1 – Distance Calculation. The best bet is the Great Circle Route (a trigonometric calculation based on the curvature of the earth) with an uplift (9% is the DEFRA recommendation) to take account of holding patterns / indirect routes etc.
2 – The g/km – This is the real guts of the calculation, and the reason for so much disagreement. Many calculators use a straight line figure, but the truth is that short distances use more fuel per km (hence CO2) as much is burnt on take off for very little actual distance. And long distances use more fuel because for every extra km you want to travel, you have to burn more fuel just to get the weight of the extra fuel off the ground in the first place.
3 – The seat class. Economy seats take up a lot less space on a plane than First Class, so you can get more passengers in. Therefore less of a share of the plane, and more efficient!
4 – The RFI (Radiative Forcing Index) – this is a real area of discussion. Essentially the understanding is that CO2 is more damaging at altitude, and you need to use a factor to multiply the actual CO2 to take account of this. The IPCC recommend 2.7, DEFRA recommend 1.9 and some people just use 1 (no impact). As you can see this can turn a 1 tonne offset into a 2.7 tonne offset between two calculators that use the same methodology.
5 – The actual offset. This is the most important bit, because you can be as accurate as possible, then if you buy a fictional / poor / downright made up offset then you’ve wasted your effort in the first place. All I can say here is you get what you pay for. We just use CERs (the UN ratified option and the most expensive method) which are the most robust, but it’s up to you to make you own mind up. But whatever you do, please don’t plant trees as an offset! It’s a lovely thing to do, but has nothing to do with carbon offsetting. A tree is a carbon “store”, not a carbon “sink”. In 100 years or so, when the tree eventually dies and rots it will release exactly the same amount of carbon back into the atmosphere. If it lasts that long!
I’m obviously going claim that our calculator is the most accurate on the market, but tell me what you think: http://www.clear-offset.com/carbon-footprint-calculator-flights.php I’d say your flight (with an RFI of 1.9) is 0.545t of carbon, assuming you fly economy and are going to STO.
Give me shout if I can be of help,
Ben
If you want loads of detail take a look here:
http://www.defra.gov.uk/environment/climatechange/uk/carbonoffset/pdf/carbon-offset-codepractice.pdf
linuskendall // September 25, 2008 at 11:51 am |
@benjaedley
Thanks a lot for the extra details – that brings me much more up to scratch as to why the calculations differ so widely – and it’s good to hear it from someone who actually works in the field.
I think you have done a good job with your calculators and clear-offset.com was one of the sites I preferred in my tests. Keep it up!
Thanks for the link too, I’ll read it through to go even deeper into this.