My wife Alisan chimes in about the choices involved in her upcoming trip:

I’m the traveler, because after seventeen years of corporate travel, my husband needs lots of encouragement to leave home turf. A week at a distant film festival with the female gang we call the “Film Sluts” just isn’t his cup of tea.

Our recent family effort to really see and understand how we’re using our energy draw has been illuminating most of the time, frustrating sometimes. So with the Santa Barbara Film Festival coming up this week, my flight to the coast and the attendant transportation needs there pretty much demanded that I make an effort to offset what I call my film fest carbon footprint.

Getting to Santa Barbara from Jackson, Wyoming requires two flights totaling approximately 1598 miles, creating 719 pounds of CO2. (I visited three different carbon calculators and they pretty much came up with the same estimates.) On the Terrapass website, I ponied up for the recommended $9.95 worth of offsets, one-third going to wind energy projects, one-third to biomass (stored cow farts – whodathunk?) and one-third to promotion of industrial efficiency (supporting companies who have pledged to reduce their own carbon footprint, either by making actual on-site changes or trading in energy credits). If you’d like to read more about these three categories, check out this page at Terrapass.

I’d already committed to no rental car and I hate cabs (except in New York City where love of taxis equals survival), so without a hotel airport shuttle (side note: Santa Barbara hotels need to collectively provide better transportation options), that left the bus. I Googled up the Metropolitan Transit District’s website and found that I’d be picked up within twenty minutes of my airport arrival (plenty of time to retrieve bags) and be downtown within a half hour (twenty if you drive) for a whopping $1.25.

Once in Santa Barbara, I have a lunch date with two friends who live nearby. One lives in Ventura, about half an hour southeast of Santa Barbara, and the other lives in Ojai, about fifteen to twenty minutes northeast of Ventura. My Ventura friend offered to drive to Santa Barbara to collect me, then we’d drive back to Ventura, up to Ojai, then back to Ventura and back to Santa Barbara to get me back to my hotel.

Whoa.

Not only was that a lot of driving, it was a lot of fuel use that didn’t need to happen. I clicked onto the Amtrak website, found out I could hop an early train to Ventura for a measly twenty bucks round-trip, have time for breakfast at a favorite spot there and get picked up by my Ventura friend for the trip to Ojai. My taking the train would save her nearly an hour of driving time, not to mention fuel and wear and tear. She drives a Prius, but c’mon, an unnecessary trip is just that, unnecessary. Besides, I love trains. The very idea of doing the “European thing” is exciting!

That left only getting around Santa Barbara to deal with. Cool, because this is where Santa Barbara gets it right. The two trolleys—one rolls up and down State Street, the main drag; the other cruises the city’s coastline—run on schedule and set you back twenty-five cents a trip. You hop on, you hop off, you do your thing. All without having to manage a car through Santa Barbara’s many one-way streets or having to pay for parking.

Sweet deal all around. I can enjoy my trip feeling less guilty about my contribution to pollution, because I’ve made the simple effort to find the least carbon-concentrated way to take it. It’s not a perfect world, you know, but, short of staying home, it’s a little better than it would be had I not made this effort.

Carbon Neutral Journal's choices are brought to you by Jorgensen Associates.

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