We’re going to be doing an unusual amount of traveling this summer, so last night I decided to calculate how much it would cost to offset the extra carbon contribution from all of our upcoming trips using Native Energy. I input the following journeys:

Round trip flight from Boston to Chicago this weekend to look for apartments: 0.68 tons of CO2 from flying 1,699.44 miles
Round trip flight from Boston to San Jose to forage for baby iguana food: 1.917 tons of CO2 from flying 4,791.59 miles
Drive from Boston to Syracuse, NY, for Sean and Tracy’s wedding, in what will likely be a small SUV: 0.074 tons of CO2 from driving 302.58 miles
Round trip flight from Boston to Washington, D.C. for Rachel and Matt’s party: 0.316 tons of CO2 from flying 789.59 miles
Drive from Boston to Chica-go-go in a large MOVING truck!: 0.637 tons of CO2 from driving 977.18 miles
Round-trip flight from Chicago to Baltimore to attend Jordan and Autumn’s wedding: 0.485 tons of CO2 from flying 1,211.32 miles

Total: 4.231 tons of CO2 from 9,771.67 miles of travel.

It costs $60 to offset 5 tons of carbon (we chose to put our money into funding wind energy projects), so I doubled that (even though we’re sharing all the driving, so it doesn’t really count twice) and for a grand total of $120, we paid to offset the carbon output of our entire summer’s epic travels, and more. That’s really not very much. If it were to be converted into a CO2 tax, for instance, it would only cost each of us an average of $10 for each trip we made. I know I’d happily pay that much extra each time I traveled. Wouldn’t you?

Edited to add that actually, the calculations worked out just right for the two of us, I realized, because I didn’t put in round-trip numbers for the drives. Also to note that the reason we’re going to Syracuse in a large vehicle is that our travel partners will be my parents-and-grandma-in-law.