Although I’d call myself an environmentalist, my simultaneous love of traveling (and historically frequent flying) has done some serious damage to my supposedly beloved Earth.

The airlines try to pat me on the back. “There there,” they say, “Just spend $3, and we’ll offset the emissions from your flight! We’ll go plant some trees in Nigeria or build a wind farm in Norway!”

After reading and researching, I can tell you that the offsets the airlines offer us are mostly doing nothing. They’re definitely not “offsetting” the flight.

Trusting those airlines to do anything besides what makes them the most money is silly. And as I’ve written about before, there’s no such thing as a sustainable airline.

So let’s talk about how to actually “offset” the very high emissions from our flying. No judgment. I still fly too. We’re in this together.

In this article, I want to actually answer the question of how to offset your flight emissions. That means being honest with you about what “offsetting” can and can’t do. I’ll cover why airline carbon offset programs are largely a guilt-relief product rather than a climate solution, and what I think actually makes more sense if you’re trying to reckon honestly with the environmental cost of flying.

A Quick Note About Personal Responsibility Vs Corporate and Government Responsibility

I know the “just fly less” conversation bumps up against a much bigger debate about whose responsibility this really is. I’ve written my full thoughts on the debate between the personal and systemic here. Our personal actions and what we do to fight for systemic changes is part of the power we do have. We shouldn’t relinquish it.

TL;DR

• Airline carbon offset programs they sell at checkout are largely ineffective and poorly verified. Clicking that $3 button is not offsetting your flight.
• The single most impactful thing you can do is fly less. I give myself a limit of six flights per year.
• When you do fly, and I still fly, skip the airline’s program. I try to offset it in other ways.
• There’s no clean answer here. You can look for verified offsets (like ones with a Gold Standard or Verified Carbon Standard certification). Or you can fund something you care about directly.
• Basically, I give myself my own carbon tax. If I can afford to go to Europe… I can afford the self-imposed tax.

What Is a Carbon Offset for a Flight, Anyway?

Before I tell you why I think they mostly don’t work, let me explain what flight carbon offsets are supposed to do.

The theory goes like this: your flight emits a certain amount of emissions, including CO₂ and other warming gases. Since there’s currently no way to un-emit that CO₂, you instead pay to fund a project somewhere else in the world that either removes an equivalent amount of emissions from the atmosphere or prevents it from being emitted in the first place.

Tree planting in the Amazon. Clean cookstoves in Nigeria. A solar farm in Senegal. In theory, the net effect on the atmosphere is zero. Your emissions are “offset” elsewhere.

Airlines figured out this was a good product to sell. It’s low cost, it makes people feel better about booking, and it costs the airline nothing to offer. Which is, partially, how you should think about it.

Why Airline Carbon Offsets Are Mostly Nonsense

This summer, I’m taking what I’d call a once-in-a-lifetime trip to Japan. When I was a teenager, I lived with a host family in Spain. My host brother and his parents are flying out from Spain, and my girlfriend and I are joining them. When I booked my flight, I saw the checkbox. For $14, I could “offset” the emissions from New York to Tokyo and back.

I didn’t click it. There are two reasons why.

1) The Offsets Airlines Sell You Have Little Accountability

I remembered this investigation by the Guardian in 2023, which found that more than 90% of Verra’s rainforest offset credits (the most widely used carbon credits in the world, and the kind used by airlines) weren’t doing anything. The carbon savings they claimed weren’t real. The threat to the forests they were supposedly protecting was wildly overstated.

Delta even got sued. The EU took action against 20 airlines in 2024 for misleading environmental claims, and KLM actually lost a court case in the Netherlands over its “Fly Responsibly” offset campaign being ruled deceptive advertising.

Carbon offsets don’t reduce the emissions from your flight. They fund something somewhere else that’s supposed to offset it. The chain of custody between your $8 and an actual ton of CO₂ being removed from the atmosphere is long, murky, and almost impossible to verify. In this case, this was even one of the “reputable” certifications.

2) The Cost of The Offset Is Just Nowhere Near Enough

If you’re flying from JFK to Tokyo and back (like me), you are responsible for several metric tons of carbon being dumped directly into the upper atmosphere.

Then the airline looks you in the eye and says you can wipe that slate clean for the price of a mediocre airport salad.

The math does not math.

According to atmosfair’s offset calculator, a round-trip flight to Japan for two produces more emissions than a car for an entire year. They estimate the real offset cost at over $300.

The airlines’ offsets are either the cheapest possible credits from massive, poorly-monitored projects, usually “avoided deforestation.”

If we actually had to pay the real cost, that $14 fee would need to be several times higher.

When I look at my trip to Japan, I have to acknowledge that my presence on that plane has a heavy price tag that a “verified” sticker can’t just hand-wave away.

If the “offset” costs less than the Uber to the airport, it’s a sign that we aren’t actually paying for the damage. We’re just paying for the right to stop feeling bad about it.

I’m not saying this to make you cancel your vacation. I’m still going to Japan. But we have to stop pretending that a few bucks at checkout makes the flight “neutral.” It’s not neutral. It’s an environmental debt we’re racking up, and we need to be a lot more honest about what it actually costs to pay it back.

So What Can We Do to Offset The Flying?

The check boxes won’t save us. So what should we do?

1) Avoid Short Flights

Short flights suck. TSA lines to go somewhere that Amtrak takes me is just not something I want to do.

And per mile, short flights are the most damaging because landing and takeoff use the most fuel.

They’re also the easiest to get rid of.

I take this to extremes, but if a bus or a train is remotely reasonable, I do that. We should not compensate for what we can simply not do in the first place.

If you want to compare flying to trains and buses for your trip, you can see my review of a search tool called Omio.

2) Know The Cost of What You’re Emitting (I Use Atmosfair)

The “offset calculators” out there I’m sure aren’t perfect, but they’re better than the airline’s math.

I use Atmosfair, a German non-profit with one of the most popular and rigorous calculators out there.

When you plug in a round trip from New York to Tokyo, you’ll see a staggering figure: roughly 3–4 metric tonnes of CO2 equivalent per passenger.

For context, that’s about what an average car emits in an entire year. As someone who lives car-free and takes pride in that, seeing my annual “savings” wiped out by one trip hurts. But we have to look at the numbers.

3) Donate That Cost Directly to Projects

I’m not a huge fan of donating things to “funds.” I’d rather know what projects the money is going to. Maybe that’s irrational. Maybe that means I don’t end up spending it on the best “value” in terms of carbon. But I do think about the issues that matter to me.

So I take that cost, view it as my “carbon tax,” and give that money to an organization I believe is doing meaningful climate work.

An easy way would be to donate that to Atmosfair. They directly execute projects around the world.

Another approach that I take is to donate to places like the Rail Passengers Association, which lobbies in Washington for better passenger rail infrastructure in the U.S., and Open Plans, a New York-based nonprofit pushing for safer streets and better transit.

Is this scientifically calibrated to offset my exact emissions? No. Is there a clean causal line between my $100 and a measurable reduction in CO₂? Also no.

But this is where our personal actions connect back to system. The real damage of aviation isn’t just the CO₂ from any single flight.

It’s a system problem a world where flying is cheap and easy while trains are expensive and slow, where airlines have lobbied for decades against climate regulation, where the infrastructure for lower-carbon travel simply doesn’t exist in many places.

Putting our money toward changing the system, I think, makes more sense than buying some offset I don’t understand and don’t see the connection to.

There’s No Clean Answer Here

If you’ve read this far hoping I’d give you a simple fix, I’m sorry. There isn’t one. The honest summary is: fly less, and when you do fly, don’t let the airline sell you a clear conscience for $8.

For me, I think more so, it’s a question worth sitting with. The fact that you’re asking how to offset your flight emissions at all means you’re thinking about this more seriously than most people do. There’s a line in a nice Ted talk, We Need to Stay on The Ground by Maja Rosen, about how this choice, this conversation, can change culture. “Choosing not to fly… is a very effective way to get more people to wake up to the severity of the situation.” I’d channel Katherine Hayhoe’s common point that talking about this stuff is a key first step.

Our actions can shift culture, and shifting culture shifts the world.

I’m still figuring this out. But I think the self-tax, the advocacy donations, and the honest accounting are a better place to start than a checkbox at an airline’s checkout page.