Carbon offsets for your wedding

Many couples are either calculating their own carbon offsets for their wedding, or informing guests how to offset their carbon footprint for plane or car travel. Some couples suggest buying carbon offsets as a wedding gift.

You can use the wedding calculator at terrapass.org to calculate and offset your wedding costs.

Their wedding calculator takes into account four different sources of emissions:

Airline emissions from guest travel. For most weddings, this is by far the most important category of emissions. Planes burn a lot of fuel, and these days most weddings bring together people from all over the country and the world.

Automobile emissions from guest travel.
Cars aren't likely to be a huge source of greenhouse gas emissions for your wedding, but if you have a lot of local guests, they will collectively burn a modest amount of gasoline getting to the event.

Energy use in hotel rooms. Hot showers, lighting, and air conditioning all require electricity. For large weddings, this energy use can add up.

Energy use for the wedding itself. The DJ, the caterer, temperature control, lighting – whether you have your wedding on the beach or in a banquet hall, the event itself requires some energy. Truth be told, the amount of emissions from the event itself is small – about one ton of CO2 or less – so we just add a little to the total to cover it."

Here are some other Carbon Offset sites:
Native Energy,
Carbonoffsets and
MyClimate in the US,
planetair in Canada, (good international info and calculators at The David Suzuki Foundation) and
Climate Care in Europe.
The Carbon Neutral Company
GreentagUSA Wedding offset calculator

Also see our list of Ethical Gift Registries, which include carbon offsets.

UPDATE from the United Nations:
U.N. to tighten rules on earning carbon offsets
LONDON (Reuters) - The U.N.'s climate change agency on Wednesday proposed to make it more difficult for speculators to earn carbon offsets from emissions-cutting projects which were already profitable. Under the U.N.-run Kyoto Protocol, industrialized nations can meet limits on their output of planet-warming gases such as carbon dioxide by funding emissions cuts in the developing world in a scheme called the Clean Development Mechanism

The scheme is meant to cut the world's overall output of greenhouse gases, but has drawn criticism for counting emissions cuts from projects, for example in wind and hydro power, which were already profitable and likely to go ahead regardless of the U.N. scheme. Such criticism has threatened to impact demand in the $13 billion market, for example in the European Union where policy officials have expressed concern about the quality of projects.

Projects in future would have to show that emissions cuts were a direct result of the U.N. scheme, Any new rules would initially apply to new biomass plants using waste to generate power, but could be widened to other projects, the panel suggested in proposals found