There’s a certain irony about coming to Alaska to experience an unspoiled environment. The average round-trip flight to Alaska releases over 1000 pounds of CO2 per person into the environment. When you add the gasoline you use once you’re here – most of our packages are self-drive – you’re getting near one ton of CO2 per person released on a typical Alaska vacation.

That seems like a lot to me.

I started to research what a company like Alaska Vacation Store could do to become more environmentally-friendly. I thought it would be really cool if you could create a carbon-neutral vacation package.

It turns out, from a practical standpoint, you can’t.

Sure, you can get on the Internet and do a search on carbon-neutral travel, and there are plenty of web pages there… but nobody has made it easy, or even practical, to take a carbon-neutral vacation - and this is really the key. The people who are passionate about it (perhaps to the point of obsession) will do whatever it takes to be carbon-neutral. But there is a large segment of the population that believes that it is important to limit carbon emissions, but are unable or unwilling to make the kinds of sacrifices that you need to make for a truly carbon-neutral trip.

When I did my research, I was immediately drawn to the idea of purchasing carbon offsets. The average trip releases X-amount of carbon, and you purchase enough offsets to cover the carbon released on that trip.

But there’s a problem with that… and that is, from a consumer standpoint, purchasing carbon offsets is a lot like donating to a charity. Part of the cost goes to overhead. So in a really well-run charity, (or carbon offset company) most of the money goes where it is intended…  and in poorly-run ones, most of the money goes to overhead… or in the worst cases, somewhere else.

If I purchase a carbon offset worth a ton of CO2, I want to remove a ton of CO2 from the atmosphere. And since the whole  premise of carbon offsets is that they are like commodities, one ton of carbon offset needs to be the same as another. But they’re not.

Moreover, when you research environmentally-sound travel, a emphasis of many websites goes towards making the office more green. I think that is important, and I have made some strides there. But in all honesty, the amount of carbon my office operation has released into the environment over the years I have been in business is an order of magnitude less than the average CO2 release on a typical vacation. And I’ve planned hundreds of vacations. Fixing my office doesn’t fix the carbon footprint.

In my office I am transitioning my record-keeping to a more electronic system. Almost all correspondence with clients and vendors is done by email, and I am reducing the amount of paper I use. I have switched my old CRT monitors to flat screens – they’re both energy efficient and larger. My next project is to turn my hundred-page confirmation packet into an electronic document. One advantage of my packages is that our vendors do not require vouchers, so a guest could, in theory, take his or her entire trip and keep all the documents on a CD or DVD, and never need a piece of paper. Unfortunately, that method of delivering documents is not practical for every guest, because not everyone brings their laptop to Alaska with them. But you could create an electronic document with all of the descriptions, maps, driving directions, etc. and put them on a CD. In fact, it could be cooler than any paper document packet. You could include audio and video. It is coming, but we’re not there yet.

That addresses at least some of the environmental concerns… but the larger concern – how to remove a ton of CO2 per person for every visitor to Alaska – remains unanswered. There are some human activities that by their very nature, and not particularly friendly to the environment, and flying across the continent is one of them. I am not suggesting that people stop traveling. Instead, I think the win-win here would be to find a way to negate the impacts of the travel. As the owner of a tour company, I would like nothing better than to be able to offer my clients a way to offset their carbon footprint in Alaska. I think it would be a great selling point, and great for the environment… Not to mention that this isn’t an Alaska-only solution. You could use this to offset travel (or anything else) anywhere.

Now one could argue that reducing the carbon footprint of a 737 is the responsibility of the airline… and that’s true. But for the moment, that part of the equation is not considered, and really, we’re not talking about reducing the footprint of a jet, but rather, eliminating our footprint as passengers through offsets. A jet is always going to emit CO2. If at some point in the future they come up with a more efficient and carbon-friendly jet, or  the airlines decide to offset its emissions in some other way, that just reduces what we as consumers need to account for when we shoot for carbon-neutral travel.

When someone comes up with a carbon offset product that a consumer could buy that actually removed carbon from the environment, and assured the consumer that the money spent was actually going towards  removing carbon rather than paying salaries (and other things), my guess is that travelers will be eager to use them to make for carbon-neutral transactions.