If you're not already familiar with offsetting your ecological footprint than this How To will serve as a nice introduction in doing so, step by step. Carbon offsets (or carbon offsetting) differs slightly from renewable energy credits (REC's) in that they serve to balance out whatever negative contribution you've made in travel (whereas REC's provide an alternative for clean energy supply, usually in home and business energy use). The example below uses air travel but they can also apply to ground transportation (car, bus, train, etc.), etc. and utilize positive contributions such as tree planting or renewable energy and energy conservation projects, sometimes certified as Clean Development Mechanism (CDM) credits.

This isn't to say that you should go excessively drive, fly, boat, etc. as much as you want but it is a nice introduction to going green and start reducing your personal or professional contribution to global warming.

To start, you should locate a respected provider who to date, are generally those endorsed with either the Resource-Solutions/Green-e or Gold Standard programs which are some of the leading endorsement providers a energy/carbon credit retailer can get. Some of our recommended retailers include CarbonNeutral.com, Native Energy, and Green-e. In this example will be using Native Energy.

We'll assume you have the time to follow these steps now if not, that's fine. You can always come back to review the steps anytime. Once you're ready to begin however, you'll need to gather a few copies of your utility bills.

1. Once you've decided on a retailer, locate their carbon calculator.

2. With this site, you'll want to select the "Travel Calculator" and than choose your travel method, in the example here, we'll use "Flights". Than enter in your departure and arrival cities and states. The calculator will auto-calculate (auto-calc) your mileage. Continue as many times as necessary by selecting "Add This Segment" for multiple stops, "More To Calculate" to add another flight or "Done" to checkout .

3. The resulting screen will show your total mileage traveled, total CO2 produced and the total $ amount to offset your travel 'print. This site gives you 3 different options to choose from: wind, 100% farm methane (farm methane is not the best choice in our opinion) and 50/50 blend of both.

4. Once you've made your choice click "Buy Now" and you'll enter their Yahoo! shopping cart (this isn't an error, just a cheaper solution to checkout software). You may raise the number of credits or not, it's up to you but they do auto-fill your cart with the appropiate number, so you needn't bother changing this if you don't want to. Click "Checkout". A series of 4 steps will appear, fill out the information as requested and follow their prompts.

5. Once you've navigated your way through the final checkout steps, confirm that you've received their auto-generated invoice by checking in your email inbox (it's also a good idea to check your junk mail filter as companies emails are often confused for spam). Attached to your invoice is a note from the CEO of the company, thanking you for your contributions...

6. Repeat as necessary anytime for the most common travel methods.