The Blairs will offset their holiday travel apparently
In the UK The Guardian is saying Blair, Monday: I’m not offsetting carbon. Blair, yesterday: Er, I’ve had a rethink
Tony Blair tried last night to restore his green credentials by announcing that he would offset carbon emissions from his and his family’s holiday travel.
Downing Street made the concession after the two lobby briefings yesterday were dominated by Mr Blair’s insistence that he had no intention of cutting back on personal flights.Mr Blair’s official spokesman suddenly announced last night that the prime minister had asked “this week” for officials to find ways to make his holiday flights carbon neutral, beginning with last month’s trip to Miami.
It’s fast becoming a normal thing to offset your flights. Carbon Planet’s sales of flight offset packages have boomed in the last six months. All Mr Blair would have needed to do was go to our website and choose short, medium or long haul and give us his credit card details.
Lots of people ask us why we don’t include a more comprehensive flight emissions calculator. There are lots of flight emissions calculators on the web and they all give different answers. If you really want to get down and dirty and get the numbers very right, you need to ask the passenger a lot of info, like the actual flight number and date (and then your calculator needs access to flight plan data, aircraft type, fuel used, etc) and how ‘loaded’ the plane was, and if it was flying during the day, or at night. All these things and more affect the outcome. Carbon Planet decided to use rough approximations, with a small fudge-factor for overestimation built-in. The numbers are as honest as any other online emissions calculator, and save the customer lots of brain-aching details. — DS
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