Wouldn't it be nice if all airline tickets included a carbon offset fee to counter the effects of air travel? From the carbon calculator in Sustainable Travel International I learnt that my personal share in this DC-India round-trip is about 6.5609 tons of CO2 emissions. The total cost to offset this amount of CO2 is somewhere between $100 to $200, depending on the kind of offset project I choose to invest in. They have a few renewable energy, energy efficiency and international reforestation projects to choose from.

While this sounded exorbitant, I looked up their offset costs for domestic travel. A visit to my brother's at Boston from DC would mean .3136 tons of CO2 and can be offset for less than $10, which doesn't sound bad at all.

The site also has calculators to figure out carbon offsets for other things like driving, home energy, hotel stay and events. I figure there are tons of companies offering all sorts of offset programs in the lines of planting trees or offsetting our electricity use with wind power... Sometimes, the over-abundance of choice can be paralyzing. I started reading a wiki entry on Carbon Offsets and went on to read about different projects. They all sounded impressive and/or ambiguous, as one might imagine they would to my kind of people with contemptible intellectual and moral ignorance. How does one do the right thing? For now, I am going with my gut (and your help is welcome :)