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This is something I’ve been thinking about doing for a while now. One of the reasons I stick with DreamHost for my web hosting provider is that they are carbon-neutral. That’s great! I’ve heard a lot of businesses doing this, and while I’m not sure of the real benefit of simply offsetting your carbon footprint in lieu of reducing your impact with efficient living, I think it is a good idea when combined with efforts to reduce that footprint.

Climate change is a very important issue right now, and whether you fall into the “the earth is just going through a warming phase” or the “we’re destroying the planet” camp, it is important to be aware of your impact to the environment, to reduce your impact as much as you can, and to offset what you can’t reduce. If nothing else, reducing your carbon footprint is bound to reduce your energy costs as well.

Purchasing carbon offsets is one way to help, as the money goes to all sorts of great programs working on things like renewable energy projects and reforestation. With renewable energy projects in particular, you know that your money is going to reduce our need to use finite resources like oil and thereby reduce global conflicts over resources. In today’s world, those conflicts are more and more apparent. So… there’s the peace aspect of it as well. Reducing the world’s need to use finite resources reduces our need to fight over those resources. This can only be a good thing.

For Blog Action Day today, I’ve decided to go ahead and purchase carbon offset credits to offset my carbon footprint and blog about how I did it. I actually have very little carbon to offset, as it turns out! — At least as far as my home and transportation is concerned — I take public transportation, don’t travel very much and live in a small one-bedroom apartment which is relatively inexpensive to heat and cool.

Here’s what I did:

Head over to MakeMeSustainable.com and register as an individual, family or business. They’ll ask you to fill out their form to get your estimated carbon footprint (they call it a thumb print). Go on. I’ll wait.

Once you’re all signed up, you can click on “Actions.” From the Actions page, there are Lifestyle, Home/Office and Carbon Offsets tabs. Click on the Carbon Offsets tab.

They will have populated the form for you for your carbon usage. Click “Purchase” and you’re shot over to NativeEnergy.com where you can select the type of credits you want. You can choose for your money to go to Wind Farming, Methane or a combination of both. I went with Wind Farming. The total for your purchase is right below that, with an option to pay monthly or by the year. I chose monthly.

Just follow through with all of that and that’s it! Your credit card will get charged every month or year for the amount you agreed to. My total came to $8 a month, which is a pretty small price to pay considering all the consuming I actually do and money I waste on things that aren’t helpful to anyone but me.

Like I said though, offsetting isn’t enough. BlogActionDay.com has a great list of resources to take a look at and see what you can do to live more green. I’ll keep posting over time to talk about how I’m continuing to work on reducing my footprint.