Globe and Mail: Greg McMillan

When it comes to the idea of environmentally sustainable air travel, many skeptics roll their eyes. The notion that airline passengers can simply pay a fee that goes toward programs to help neutralize, or offset, the impact of airline travel doesn’t get at the real heart of the problem, critics say.

But supporters of so-called green travel say such offset programs are an important tool in fighting climate change. Airline travel “has a disproportionately large impact on the climate system,” notes the Vancouver-based David Suzuki Foundation. “It accounts for 4 to 9 per cent of the total climate-change impact of human activity.”

The concept behind green air travel is simple:

Fossil-fuel burning airplanes create carbon emissions. The longer the flight, the more the emissions.

A specific flight’s emissions can be calculated on a per-passenger basis.

A passenger can pay, either to the airline or to an outside company, what amounts to a user fee to offset his share of the flight’s negative impact.

The fee goes toward environmental sustainability – tree planting, the purchase and preservation of green space, efforts to halt soil erosion, and investment in solar or wind-power projects, for example.

Air Canada passengers, for example, can donate $1.70 to offset the carbon cost of a flight from Toronto to Montreal, or $54.27 for a flight from Toronto to Sydney, Australia; the money goes to a forestation project in Maple Ridge, B.C., arranged by not-for-profit organization Zerofootprint Inc.

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