My partner and her daughter are flying to Kansas for Thanksgiving. Toni handed me a blue sticker with the words "terrapass flight" on it. She bought essentially 1,000 pounds of offset for thier flight expenditure in CO2 - as she bought her flight ticket. "Just a few dollars," she said, and "You might like to blog this." So I looked it up. Terrapass said that to offset driving my CR-V would cost me about $49 a year:

Your car emits 8,158 lbs of CO2 per year.
You should get a Standard TerraPass.
A Standard TerraPass offsets 12,000 lbs of CO2,
enough to balance one year of your driving.

How does it work? Terra pass funds go fund building renewable energy alternatives like wind farms. So it's a way to offset the amount of carbon expenditure we use for living. It doesn't let us off the hook for using less energy, but it's a way to give back.

A clever thing -- I can assuage some of my guilt for a trip by donating the carbon cost of that trip to a a company that aggregates those funds and plows them into some part of the solution. This is a great example of a business model that supports being green.

And the conversation? The ten-year-old in our house asked about the terra pass, which we explained. Then we went on to talk about how we were trying to find ways to help with global warming. So she got up and wandered around the house turning off unused lights. Let's hear it for the next generation! Of course, she still sleeps with a light on, but every step matters.

And why didn't we notice which lights we weren't using?