Going on a holiday, vacation, eurotrip, siesta, sabbatical, island retreat, rekindling romantic getaway? We all deserve relaxation and seeing a bit of the world before we die. But there is more than just cost and getting time off to consider. Estimate the carbon impact and social cost of your past or future trip with this database based tool.
For a person who lives an otherwise low impact, near scavenger-like lifestyle, you will find that your greatest carbon impact is your wordliness and wanderlust. You, world traveler, can use this tool to make future vacations incrementally more sustainable, drastically alter current plans to the confusion of travel companions, or as a baseline quote for your purchase of carbon offsets or renewable energy credits (so you can feel better about your carbon neutrality).
This tool pulls from an extensive database managed by our climate friendly friends at Carbon Interface. Their estimation methodologies are built off the backs of many exasperated climatologists and annoyed mathematicians. Their powerful and accesible API was built off the neurons of sleep-deprived developers fueled by shade-grown fairtrade coffee who always code in dark mode.
"The Social Cost of CO2 is meant to be a comprehensive estimate of climate change damages and includes changes in net agricultural productivity, human health, property damages from increased flood risk, and
changes in energy system costs, such as reduced costs for heating and increased costs for air conditioning. However, given current modeling and data limitations, it does not include all important damages.
-US EPA
The Biden Administration set it to $51 per ton in March 2021. It was $50 under Obama. There are lot of different cost estimates based on different discount rates, inflation, years, and percentiles and other fun economic attributes. For this API, I pegged the cost at the 2025 average rate of $68 per ton per this table. If your nerd ass wants to learn more read the technical documentation.
If you found out your traveling habits cost the world a bunch of money, consider donating to a local group that works toward carbon neutrality like Carbon Neutral Indiana. They fund dope carbon sink projects.