When you road-trip to Disney or jet first class across the country, you feel the sucker punch to your savings. Appre­ci­ating how it impacts the planet is more abstract. So we represented the carbon cost of a solo 1,700-mile trip from Chicago to L.A. as the area of trees needed to counteract it. (For reference, a sapling can eat up to 50 pounds of CO2 each year.) Depending on how you go, offsetting a trip could require a veritable forest.