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Concerned about her impact on the environment, Nora Miller regularly recycles papers and plastics. The fiftysomething resident of Tucson saves energy by keeping the lights and air-conditioning off when she can, and by setting her thermostat at 26 degrees or higher — even on some of Arizona's hottest days. But when it comes to travel, Miller says, she isn't always as conscientious.

“I feel a little bit stuck when I'm travelling,” she says, pointing out that on business trips she often takes planes, which, because of their high operating altitudes, account for a disproportionate amount of greenhouse gas emissions. “I think about it, but I don't always do a good job of doing something about it.”

She did find an opportunity to do something, however, when she booked a plane trip to Portland, Ore., on Travelocity.com. Among the add-ons the site pushed during the booking process was a new program that offers to neutralize the environmental impact of customer trips by planting trees, which absorb carbon dioxide, the primary greenhouse gas. Miller paid $25 to have enough trees planted, by the calculations of the non-profit Conservation Fund, the group running the program, to offset the carbon emissions that could be attributed to her trip. (Travelocity.ca, the Canadian branch of the on-line agency, offers the carbon-offset option to travellers booking travel packages from Canada to the United States. A spokeswoman said the company is studying ways to expand the program globally.)

Call it penance for eco-conscious travellers: A growing number of travel websites and non-profit groups are selling so-called carbon offsets designed to compensate for travel-generated emissions by reducing levels of greenhouse gases in some unrelated way.

“It's kind of nice when you're up there motoring along at 500 miles an hour, spewing stuff into the atmosphere, to know at least a little bit will be taken care of,” Miller says.

Earlier this year, Calgary-based WestJet began passing a percentage of airfares to the Offsetters Climate Neutral Society, a Vancouver-based organization that funds environmental projects, when customers book through the www.offsetters.ca website. “It's sort of like a finder's fee or a commission,” said WestJet spokeswoman Gillian Bentley, who declined to disclose the amount donated for each ticket.

Offsetters, in turn, is partnered with Climate Care Trust, a U.K.-based group that operates projects ranging from reforestation in Uganda to installing efficient light bulbs in Asia. British Airways is also partnered with Climate Care, designing a carbon-emission calculator used by the organization at www.climatecare.org/britishairways. Air Canada, for its part, has been evaluating similar programs, but no decision has been made to launch one, according to spokesman Peter Fitzpatrick.

Generally, here's how it works: Travellers go to one of several carbon-offset websites — www.carbonneutral.com and www.resurgence.org/carboncalculator, for example — and use a “carbon calculator” to determine the approximate amount of carbon dioxide produced when they drive, fly or otherwise burn fossil fuels. Then they buy “offsets,” donating money for projects that promise to produce energy without burning fossil fuels or otherwise reduce greenhouse gases in the atmosphere. The reduction financed by the purchase is supposed to equal the amount of gas the trip created. Typically, the price is anywhere from $5.60 to $33, depending on the length of the trip and the form of transportation. (Some sites also offer predetermined fees based on popular itineraries so travellers don't have to log their exact mileage.)

Expedia.com, for example, has teamed up with TerraPass (www.terrapass.com), a Web-based for-profit company in Menlo Park, Calif. Expedia started offering carbon offsets in August, charging about $6.75 to offset 450 kilograms of carbon dioxide — the amount emitted, per passenger, on a round-trip flight of up to 3,500 kilometres. It's $19 for a cross-continent flight of up to 10,500 kilometres, and $34 for an international flight of up to 21,000 kilometres. A traveller who buys offsets for a medium or long-haul flight gets a free “Carbon Balanced Flyer” luggage tag.

“It's a program we're watching with interest, and we may offer something similar in the future,” said Sean Shannon, managing director of Expedia's Canadian division.

It is still unclear how much impact these programs actually have on climate change — or whether they function mostly as a way for travellers to justify the amount of pollution they generate on trips. Some, like the Conservation Fund's Go Zero program, plant trees on protected land. Others, like MyClimate, offered by Sustainable Travel International, create renewable energy, often through projects in developing countries. A MyClimate donation, for example, might go toward replacing diesel boilers with solar power to heat water in schools.

In the two years or so since these programs appeared, they have become increasingly popular among the growing number of travellers who take vacations where they can volunteer on humanitarian projects, stay in eco-friendly lodges and drive hybrid rental cars. MyClimate collected more than $380,000 from the sales of carbon offsets last year, which it said neutralized about 30,000 tonnes of carbon dioxide. So far this year, the company has already collected more than $2-million, which according to its figures will offset roughly 170,000 tonnes of carbon dioxide.

While that may be a start, it's far from a solution to the problem of global warming. Offset programs acknowledge this. “Climate change is a six-and-a-half-gigaton problem,” says Tom Arnold, chief executive of TerraPass. Rather, he says, voluntary carbon offsetting is just one part of a comprehensive strategy needed to tackle global warming, encourage corporate action and promote long-term public policy on climate change.

There are several things to keep in mind when deciding where to put your money. Most of the new travel-related carbon reduction programs say they base their offset calculations on guidelines developed by the World Resources Institute, a non-profit environmental group in Washington, D.C. But there are no widely accepted common standards for determining how much money will offset how much carbon.

To ensure you're making a genuine contribution to efforts to slow global warming, be sure that an independent third party has evaluated the program to confirm that it is delivering on the carbon reductions it promises.

Green-e (www.green-e.org), a renewable electricity certification program administered by the non-profit Center for Resource Solutions in San Francisco, is working with the World Resources Institute and other environmental groups on certification standards for voluntary offset programs. The Center for Resource Solutions has also performed independent verifications for some carbon-offset programs, including TerraPass.

The bottom line, says Mark Trexler, president of Trexler Climate and Energy Services, a climate change consulting firm in Portland, Ore., is this: “If it is a new project and your money is making that happen, then the argument for ‘I've offset my emissions' is a legitimate one. If you're flying jumbo jets and simply making a philanthropic contribution to something that isn't changing behaviour and isn't resulting in new projects, it's simply increasing someone's profit margin.”

The New York Times News Service, with files from Laszlo Buhasz