Why doesn Sierra Club Outings offer “carbon-neutral” trips?
If you’ve been shopping around for travel, you know that many of our competitors offer so-called “carbon-neutral” trips. As an environmental organization, why don’t we? Quite frankly, we think that calling travel “carbon-neutral” is misleading. Although we believe in the offsets we offer through NativeEnergy, it’s important to remember that offsetting your emissions does not “undo” them. Rather, it reduces carbon emissions elsewhere to “offset” what you have emitted. (See how it works.) Sure, we could just raise our trip prices, take care of the offset payment for you, and call ourselves carbon-neutral. In fact, we’d probably sell more trips and make more money that way. Problem is, we’d be missing a valuable opportunity to educate you about global warming and the impact that your personal choices have. We’d rather let you calculate your emissions and decide how you can reduce your overall carbon footprint by reducing travel or making changes in other aspects of your life.
