A green policy takes flight

Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger crisscrosses the globe in a private Gulfstream 400 jet, advocating environmental virtues after signing a significant global warming reduction bill last year. He says he offsets his plane's greenhouse gas damage by financing projects that reduce carbon emissions elsewhere.

But the governor refuses to reveal how much money he has spent on emissions credits, making it impossible to determine how much he has reduced his carbon footprint. The governor also refuses to say how many hours he has flown.

"As is the case with most public officials, personal and financial details of their life are often kept private," said Schwarzenegger press secretary Aaron McLear. "It's important that a public official is able to have some kind of a private life, and that's why we have a policy not to discuss his private financial life."

Schwarzenegger's Gulfstream 400 plane emits as much as 4.9 metric tons of carbon dioxide per hour, according to the online luxury journal Helium Report, roughly the equivalent of what a small passenger car produces in one year over the course of 8,000 miles.

Since July, the governor has used a new carbon offsets program run by NetJets, the private jet company through which he flies, McLear said. NetJets charges Gulfstream 400 customers $47.13 per hour flown to offset their emissions. The money goes toward a New Zealand wind farm, as well as projects to prevent harmful methane from spewing from an abandoned coal mine in Illinois and three dairy farms in Wisconsin.

By that measurement, Schwarzenegger pays $94.26 in offsets for each round-trip commute between his Los Angeles home and the Capitol in Sacramento, assuming each one-way flight takes an hour in flying time. That expenditure is minuscule – less than 0.4 percent – compared with the estimated $12,800 per hour it costs to fly a Gulfstream 400, according to Helium Report.

In one recent 11-day span this fall when Schwarzenegger flew to New York City, Puerto Peñasco, Mexico, and Shanghai, China, he racked up more than 42 hours in flying time, based on estimates from commercial flight times. To offset his emissions through NetJets, he would have paid $2,012, a small fraction of the estimated $547,000 he paid to fly.

Those figures do not account for commute trips between Sacramento and Los Angeles during those 11 days because Schwarzenegger would not disclose how often he returned home due to security concerns, McLear said.

Environmentalists have mixed feelings about the governor's offsets policy. They applaud Schwarzenegger for trying to counteract the carbon emissions from his private jet, but they suggest offsets give him and other private fliers an easy excuse to maintain their lifestyles.

"I think we all recognize the governor's need to travel, but when it's possible from a scheduling standpoint and a security standpoint, we would want them to travel in a lower-polluting method," said Bill Magavern, a Sierra Club California lobbyist. "Offsets should not be used as an argument for excessive consumption ... but after one has reduced emissions wherever possible, I think investing in legitimate offsets (is) the next step to take. I give the governor credit for bothering to do that."

For the first half of the year, Schwarzenegger used a Humboldt County forest preservation program run by the Pacific Forest Trust before switching to NetJets' program in July, McLear said. The governor has prepaid for emissions credits that will last through the end of 2008.

Neither NetJets nor the Pacific Forest Trust would disclose how much money the governor has paid to offset his emissions this year, though both confirmed that he has used their programs.

By comparison, the governor's predecessor, Gov. Gray Davis, used Southwest Airlines to commute between Sacramento and his own Los Angeles-area home.

Even though large passenger jets burn more fuel and emit more carbon than private planes, their impact per passenger is far less. According to TerraPass, a carbon offsets service, a one-way flight from Sacramento to Los Angeles on a commercial plane emits 477 pounds of carbon dioxide per passenger, less than 5 percent of what Schwarzenegger's private jet does.

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• Call Kevin Yamamura, Bee Capitol Bureau, (916) 326-5548.