Offset Your Shopping Cart

There’s a new step at the virtual checkout: after you select your gift-wrapping and method of shipping, you can also buy instant absolution for your guilty conscience. It’s called carbon offsetting, and until recently, it was being encouraged mainly as a way to mitigate the carbon emitted when we fly, drive, light, and gas up—or pass gas in—our houses. The black list (or maybe greenhouse gas list?) of carbon emitting activities now includes shopping, but luckily for us there are many stores offering carbon-offset options with our purchases—a convenient alternative, for now, to reducing our consumption. With one additional click you can buy a tree or renewable energy to go with that top … and it will look all the better with your clean conscience.

The following online stores hope you won’t meander down High Street or Main Street anytime soon. Instead, they applaud you for shopping with them since they save energy by not having to power lights in a shop, and refrain from pushing plastic bags on you since they don’t have a store. This way, everyone is in the green. But in order for their footprint to represent that of Bambi’s (rather than Big Foot’s), they have to offset their own carbon emissions, which is where you come in.

EarthMoment
So you want to compare deals before you kick back to the climate? Owned by the same media company that publishes my favorite Utne Reader, EarthMoment partnered with more than 1,000 companies that pay a commission to EarthMoment, of which half is donated to investments managed by Carbonfund.org for renewable energy, energy efficiency, and reforestation projects in the U.S. and around the world.

Biblio.com
By connecting independent booksellers with the global marketplace, Biblio encourages customers to purchase used books while sharing their entire book shipping details (including the weight of packages, mileage used for each book delivery, and energy consumed by their office, including employee commutes) with NativeEnergy. NativeEnergy, a Native American, farmer-owned, community-based renewable energy company, then calculates a total carbon footprint from these figures and Biblio.com purchases an equivalent investment of alternative energy, all without cost to their booksellers or customers.