Solving for hypocrisy while writing about beer against climate change
To report a feature for our weekly recently, I flew twice from New York to the American West, first to Los Angeles and San Francisco, and then two weeks later to Kansas City and Jackson Hole. Although each trip was tight—less than a day in each location, nearly as much time in transit as I spent in a given destination (it’s the journey!)—I did get to visit the world-renowned surf break at C Street, in Ventura, California; lunch at Fish, a sustainable seafood mecca in Sausalito; and admire the Teton Range, mountains that render me giddy, contemplative, or just plain dewy. None of it a bad day’s work. And yet as I made the sprint from one end to the other of the Denver airport’s interminable Terminal B, I felt slightly ashamed.
See, I was reporting on Patagonia, the company that once urged us all not to buy one of its jackets because of its unavoidable environmental impact. On Oct. 3, the company’s sister food startup, Patagonia Provisions, came out with an India Pale Ale that includes a grain from an intermediate wheatgrass called Kernza that has the potential, as a perennial, to draw more CO2 out of the air and store it in the ground, plants being the original carbon sequestration technology. Patagonia is justifiably proud (and arguably sanctimonious) about its efforts to reduce its ecological footprint and support environmental activism. The company says it’s spending $1 million to get out the green vote (#votetheplanet) this November, too, something I didn’t have room to get into.
After reading the story, a friend wrote that he could “feel the weight of [my] efforts to get past their slickness,” but it might have been more the case that I had to resist my own desire for Patagonia’s new food division to be on to something good. Either way, the more critical I was, the more hypocritical I risked becoming. Plus, something Patagonia founder Yvon Chouinard had told me years ago came to mind (this time while being ordered into Airplane Mode at O’Hare): “Whatever circle of hell I end up in will be burning jet fuel.”
So I decided to party like it’s 2006 and purchase carbon offsets for my reporting trips. You remember offsets: They were a thing back when everyone was buying squiggly lightbulbs, the Dave Matthews Band toured “carbon neutrally,” and Knut the polar bear cub appeared on the cover of Vanity Fair. The idea is that you make up for the greenhouse gases you’ve pumped into the atmosphere by underwriting conservation and renewable energy projects; you remove (or allow others to avoid) as much damage as you’ve caused. Of course, those who lined up to do these offsets weren’t always on the level or very good at their jobs, and offsets earned a not completely undeserved reputation as a waste. (Poor Knut met with a worse end, drowning in front of 600–700 visitors at the Berlin Zoo.)
So where could I buy carbon offsets that wouldn’t be throwing my money away? Bloomberg, where I work, is progressive on these issues, so I wrote to the head of our sustainability team. He replied promptly that while he bought them from time to time for himself, he’d found them impractical for the company. Besides, Bloomberg likes to support sustainability efforts directly, such as installing solar panels in several offices, and volunteer programs that have so far planted 1 million trees in metro New York. Those add up to a significant offset in themselves, and have helped put the company on track to keep its commitment to 100 percent clean power by 2025. He suggested I look at South Pole Group for my offset purchase, and tipped me that the company counts the carbon cost of our business trips—it’s a line item on our travel itinerary. A quick search of my email attachments proved him right. At the end of each flight, there’s an entry like this one from my first leg, JFK to LAX:
Equipment: Airbus Industrie A321–200
Distance: 2468 miles / 3971.012 kilometers
CO2 Emissions: 923.03 lbs/419.56 kgs
There are also entries for rental vehicles:
CO2 Emissions: Each gallon of unleaded gasoline consumed is 19.6 lbs/8.91 kgs and litre of petrol is 5 lbs/2.31 kgs
Special Information: HYBRIDELECTRIC
Armed with these figure and metrics, and my receipts, I did some quick math. Well, it wasn’t all that quick, and this may point to the other inconvenient truth about offsets: Unless you make crude estimates, it’s a bit time-consuming. Like completing a second expense report.
Eventually, I learned I was on the hook for 3,450.08 pounds of CO2 for my flights. And another 325.40 lbs. for my rental cars (the drive to Salina, Kansas, took nearly three hours). After some further back-of-envelope calculations, I added 500 lbs. for the air conditioning at the Holiday Inn Express in Salina (where it was 97F on the first day of autumn), plus the charging of laptops, etc. In all, about 4,500 pounds of CO2.
After checking out South Pole Group, I opted to go with TerraPass for my carbon offsets. TerraPass had been the recommendation of Robert Parkhurst, director of agriculture greenhouse gas markets for the Environmental Defense Fund, and a valuable background source for my story. Like the EDF, Parkhurst believes markets can play a positive role in addressing climate change.
TerraPass was founded in 2004 by University of Pennsylvania professor Karl Ulrich and some of his students. Twelve years on, it claims to have reduced the equivalent of 36 million pounds of CO2 in the atmosphere. Among the projects they’ve funded that I found compelling are landfills, like this one in Maryland, that capture methane, a potent greenhouse gas.
It doesn’t hurt that TerraPass’s site is easy to use. Individuals can offset their CO2 at a rate of $5.95 per 1,000 pounds. Why $6 per 1K lbs.? I’m sure the pricing of this is fascinating, but I trusted them on this one. Worked out to $23.80 for yours truly, or a little less than the California state flag Patagonia beanie I’ve been meaning to replace.
