20 September 2016

New Opportunity to Purchase Carbon Offsets for AAS Meeting Travel

Robert Blum Rubin Observatory/NSF's NOIRLab

Flying to and from the AAS meetings produces significant greenhouse gas emissions. The AAS Sustainability Committee is happy to announce that all AAS meeting attendees can now purchase carbon credits when registering for a meeting, starting with the upcoming 229th meeting in January in Grapevine, Texas.

The committee will pool the collected funds with those of the Division of Planetary Sciences (DPS) to choose and fund various carbon-offsetting projects. The committee encourages all attendees traveling to AAS meetings to purchase credits to help mitigate our collective carbon impact. Meeting attendees should work with their funding sources to determine the allowability of purchasing credits through their grants or other funding streams. Even if a particular grant will not allow the purchase, we encourage meeting attendees to pay for their own credits. A typical cross country round trip, which produces about one ton of CO2 per person, can be mitigated by a $50 credit. Meeting attendees can choose lesser amounts for shorter trips.

Robert Blum & James Lowenthal
On behalf of the AAS Sustainability Committee