The Geekiary’s Carbon Neutral Convention Challenge

This year we here at The Geekiary are making it our personal mission to make our major convention travel Carbon Neutral. The first one we’ll be tackling is our biggest event of the year: San Diego Comic-Con.

Why are we making our convention travel carbon neutral?

Basically, while all of us can do small things to help with the climate crisis, we felt it was important to do what we can as a website to combat it. Geek blogging doesn’t take up a lot of resources overall as we are primarily an online presence, but we do travel a lot for all these cons around the world and that puts a lot of CO2 into the atmosphere. Making our convention travel carbon neutral may be the biggest way we can make a difference as a website while continuing our own personal efforts as individuals.

Here’s an easy guide on how to achieve this so that you, too, can make an impact.

Step 1: Calculate Your Travel Carbon Footprint

I used the tool at CarbonFootprint.com to calculate each of our air travel emissions for this particular convention.  With the five of us, this comes out to about 3.88 metric tons of CO2 from our flights alone. To get a nice round number (and to accommodate for extra emissions) I’m bumping this up to 4 metric tons.

Step 2: Calculate Your Offset

There are a lot of ways you can offset and become carbon neutral. I used the same tool as I used to calculate our footprint at CarbonFootprint.com and will be offsetting one ton each month over the next six months as we prepare for the convention. They have a wide range of projects that you can sponsor including tree planting, carbon avoidance, green energy projects, and more. But you can also try the following:

• Trees.Org
• Carbon Fund
• Reforest Action

Some of the above links may require more effort to calculate than others, so go with the one that works best for you. And definitely research these organizations so you can feel confident with your donation money. We aren’t advocating for any one organization here, so feel free to shop around. Or, heck, if you want to do the legwork yourself, plant your own trees!

Step 3: Set Your Goal

The prices for carbon offsetting can vary, and everyone’s budget is different. We’ve decided to spend the next 6 months doing our offset, which puts us at about March for making our SDCC 2020 travel plans carbon neutral. We’ll be looking at some of our other events as well and determining which ones we can do similar offsetting for as the year goes on. As the website generates more income, we will increase our efforts to be as carbon neutral as possible for everything that we do.

Challenge: Make Your Convention Attendance Travel Carbon Neutral

Not everyone can do this, and that’s understandable.  We are fortunate to be in a position where we can do this.  But for those of you with the time and funds to achieve this effort, we want to toss this challenge to you. Will you pick a convention that you’re attending this year and make your travel carbon neutral?

Or, better yet, one up us and make the entire con experience carbon neutral! CarbonFootprint.com has the tools to make those calculations.

Or heck, blow us away and do this for every con you attend this year. That’s a bit out of our range right now, but we hope to head in that direction ourselves someday.

Not everyone can do everything, but everyone can do something. This is the something we’re capable of doing, and we hope you’ll join us. Every little bit helps.

Author: Angel Wilson

Angel is the admin of The Geekiary and a geek culture commentator. They earned a BA in Film & Digital Media from UC Santa Cruz. They have contributed to various podcasts and webcasts including An Englishman in San Diego, Free to Be Radio, and Genre TV for All. They identify as queer.

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