Globe and Mail: Heidi Sopinka

A quick click on your computer screen may be all it takes to reduce the impact your air travel has on the environment if a voluntary carbon-offset program announced Monday by Air Canada actually flies.

Now that we know that a single international flight can emit about as much greenhouse gas as an entire year of driving, Air Canada hopes that through its partnership with Zerofootprint, a not-for-profit organization that operates carbon-offset programs, customers will try to neutralize their environmental footprint.

It’s a Herculean task: According to the David Suzuki Foundation, flying “has a disproportionately large impact on the climate system. It accounts for 4 to 9 per cent of the total climate-change impact of human activity.”

Customers who log on to the Air Canada website can use a calculator that prompts for a starting point and a destination; it then computes the amount of emissions the flight will produce.

Travelers are then given an offset dollar figure that they can pay at the time of ticket purchase or at a later date.

Environmentally conscious travelers have already been using the Internet to buy green tags – which support renewable-energy or tree-planting projects – for the past few years. With Canada’s largest air carrier recently joining in, it is now a simple one-step process.

Continue reading the full article in The Globe and Mail.