Headed to Monterey on Amtrak? Cancel the guilt trip

You can assuage your enviroguilt and sightsee on the Central Coast this summer with a new program that pays for carbon offsets for an Amtrak trip to Monterey County.

Visitors who ride the train to Monterey County from June 1 through July 31 can turn in their ticket stub at the visitors center at the Maritime Museum, 5 Custom House Plaza, near Fisherman’s Wharf. A carbon offset then will be purchased by the Monterey County Convention & Visitors Bureau for $12 from Native Energy that’s said to mitigate a ton of carbon dioxide.

That ton is far more CO2 than a car trip would dump into the air, based on calculations from Native Energy’s website. Using its figures, a car trip in an average vehicle would dump 280 pounds of gunk into the air.

If you’re offsetting a ton, you still have 1,720 pounds left.

Which is good because there’s just one tiny hitch about turning in your train ticket and it’s this: The train goes into Salinas, not Monterey. That’s a 19-mile trip, which Amtrak apparently makes in regular buses. That’ll add about 20 more pounds of CO2, but you’d still be 1,700 pounds to the good, if offsets work the way they are supposed to.

If you booked your round-trip train ticket today for a trip June 1-7, you could pay as little as $133, according to Amtrak. For more info, you also can call (800) USA-RAIL (872-7245).

— Catharine Hamm, Los Angeles Times Travel editor

[Photo: Christopher Reynolds / Los Angeles Times]

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This entry was posted on Thursday, May 29, 2008 at 2:03 pm by Catharine Hamm and is filed under Eco-Travel, News, Tips & Advice, Northern California, Rail Travel, Weekend Getaways. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a comment, or trackback from your own site.