I recently booked a transatlantic return flight for Tony and me with Virgin Atlantic. When you view your booking details on the Virgin website, they include a link to their carbon offsetting scheme.
A while ago, I wrote a blog post (Carbon off-setting) in which I described my current view (or near lack of) of carbon off-setting schemes. When I booked the Virgin flights, I didn’t immediately go for the carbon off-setting option because it pointed to a company I’d not heard of and, in a world of dodgy carbon off-setting schemes, how do I know they’re any different?
So I did a bit of research. I remember last year the UK Government (specifically Defra) identified four carbon off-setting companies that were kind of recommended but kind of not. Which is a reflection of the state of confusion customers are in. While I used Climate Care last year because that’s what The Co-op uses (and, apparently, The Guardian too), Climate Care isn’t one of the companies on Defra’s list, which means that it doesn’t meet Defra’s guidelines. But are Defra’s guidelines really that good?
I came across an interesting article in The Guardian from last summer. At the end of the article, it mentions a not-for-profit Gold Standard method which accredits carbon off-setting projects (renewable energy and energy efficiency projects with sustainable development benefits). This rang a bell with what I’d seen on the Virgin website.
Virgin Atlantic have set up a scheme with myclimate, a Swiss not-for-profit foundation, that customers can use to offset their flights. myclimate have several projects, including some that have already achieved accreditation by the Gold Standard, which is supported by several groups, including Greenpeace.
You can be cynical about an air travel company providing this kind of service - obviously it’s great for their image - but it does look as if Virgin have spent a fair amount of effort on it. They even provide a page explaining how Virgin calculates the carbon emissions of their customers (we’re travelling Economy - hence my titular smugness).
So, having read around a bit about the Gold Standard method of assessing projects’ effectiveness, I decided to go with Virgin and myclimate’s service. And I’ll probably use myclimate in future too (although there are other companies and not-for-profits that have Gold Standard-accredited projects as well).
I’ve finally just got round to carbon off-setting our flights for this year. I did do it a year or so ago but after that I read in New Internationalist magazine about the down-sides of carbon off-setting, I was less eager to just go throwing money at some company to asuage my carbon guilt and felt I should do a bit more research.
While doing some filing just now, I found the latest issue of The Co-operative Membership magazine, which has an article about The Co-operative Bank and its ethical policy. The Co-operative Bank apparently uses the Climate Care scheme to off-set its carbon footprint of things like business flights. I figure that The Co-operative Bank is probably a reasonably reliable role-model in such things so I decided to just get on with it and calculate how much carbon I contributed to the world by flying this year.
I’m sticking to personal flights here and not counting my return flights to the US at Easter for business. I need to look into what IBM’s eco policy is for such things.
So, sticking to personal flights, I think I’ve done pretty badly this year in terms of the number of flights I’ve made. Tony and I went on holiday to Paxos, a Greek island, in May, which involved return flights to Corfu. Also, I flew from Southampton to Glasgow for a wedding in June, although I virtuously caught the train back (I couldn’t take the day off work to get the train both ways). And Tony and I have another three flights between us between Southampton and Edinburgh for another wedding. On the plus side, we went to Brussels for a weekend in February using the Eurostar both ways - which was not only greener but actually quicker and more pleasant in my opinion.
According to the Climate Care calculator, all that comes to the grand total of £8.96. Which doesn’t seem very much but I guess that’s because they’re all fairly short-haul flights. I can’t remember how much CO2 that was but I’ll get my PDF certificate within 5 days to remind me.
So do I feel less guilty about my flights? I’m not sure. I don’t think so. I still feel it was an excessive number of flights to take - especially when it is actually possible to catch trains to Scotland (although the 7.5+ hours it takes each way from Southampton does cause problems if you’re going just for the weekend). I try to imagine what I’d have done if low-cost internal flights weren’t available. I guess I’d have either taken more holiday from work or just not gone to the weddings. I don’t think the availability of carbon off-setting would have featured very heavily in my decision. My reason for catching the train home when I went to the wedding in Glasgow was that I wanted to try to be at least a bit greener. I’m quite happy to sit on a train for an afternoon with a book, and it was actually cheaper to catch the train than to fly. I actually wouldn’t mind paying a little more to catch the train than fly so I felt a bit smug that I’d proved wrong all the people who claim that flying is cheaper than other forms of transport to travel long-distance in the UK. I’ve recently discovered, in travelling more frequently between Southampton and Lancashire, that you can actually get pretty good train deals if you book far enough in advance.
So, my position on carbon off-setting isn’t cut and dried. I think I see carbon off-setting as the last resort, after trying to find greener methods of travelling. I like to think that I’m making a bit of an effort in that (catching the train and Eurostar when it’s possible) but I know it’s not really as big an effort as it could be yet.
Tony finished his job on Wednesday so we took a long weekend and went to North Wales. Which was rather exciting because Tony organised it all and didn’t tell me where we were going until we got there (I obviously got a pretty good idea when we crossed the border from Shropshire and the road signs were in a different language…and the ‘Welcome to Wales’ sign helped…).
We stayed in the Castle Ruthin (Castell Rhuthun) Hotel in Ruthin, about an hour from Snowdonia. Which was very nice. We started off in a pleasant room with a teeny four-poster bed but had to move upstairs to a grander room with no four-poster but with a large Sony LCD TV - which impressed Tony no end. Slightly bizarrely, our room doubled as the emergency exit in case of fire (through the bathroom window and out on to the roof) but, fortunately, wasn’t required to fulfill that capacity during our stay. We were, however, woken each morning by the cries of a very persistant peacock that sounded a lot like our cat Gizmo.
We counted about 3 male and 2 female (plus 3 chicks) peacocks, which live in the gardens and among the ruins of the 13th Century Ruthin Castle.
Friday, we drove down to Snowdonia with the aid of trusty ‘Jane’ (Tony’s TomTom), where we went for a ride round Lake Padern on the Llanberis Lake Railway. After lunch we visited the National Slate Museum, which is more interesting than it sounds, and included a demonstration of how they split and shape slates to make roof tiles. In the evening we drove up to Caernarfon for a wander around and dinner.
Saturday, we walked in to Ruthin town and went to the small market in the Ruthin Gaol, then went back to the castle for a leisurely sit in the sunshine in the castle gardens. Later, we visited the Valle Crucis Abbey (the ruins of a 13th Century abbey). There, we looked for some time at a series of small walls…actually there’s more left of it than that and worth seeing if you like that sort of thing.
Today, we came home. The cats have finally come in from the field. They are disdainful and Bailey has ‘lost’ his collar.
