Worried about the impact of your seven and a half-hour flight across the Atlantic on the environment? Uncertain how it will go down on the shop floor? Don’t go. Organise that meeting via conference call. Do the business via e-mail. If you really care about the planet, just don’t get on that plane.

That is the immediate response of the green movement to the quandary faced by business travellers contemplating a London-New York trip. But while some in the movement adopt a zero-tolerance, near-militant attitude towards the business community, setting up climate camps at Heathrow, many take a more pragmatic, “next best solution” approach.

Carbon offsetting is the best known tool to help the business traveller get on the flight and feel a bit more at ease about it. Carbon offsetting businesses offer on their websites carbon calculators to help individuals to calculate the carbon footprint of any flight.

The CarbonNeutral company, for example, using government guidelines, calculates that the 5,541km flight from Heathrow to JFK produces 0.6 tonnes of carbon dioxide.

This can be offset by paying a few pounds to reduce an equivalent amount of CO2 elsewhere. CarbonNeutral can invest your fiver towards construction of a small-scale hydro facility in the south of India, the restoration of 13 hectares of forest land in the Scottish borders, a gas power project in the Rhine and Ruhr valleys of Germany, and numerous other suggestions.

That brings companies into discussions with carbon offsetting companies about rethinking their business travel procurement policies, which forces companies to look at travel buying choices not just in terms of prices and scheduling but emissions, too.

In response, some airlines have begun promoting themselves as more energy-efficient and environmentally friendly than others. Sir Richard Branson claims to be leading the charge, pledging $3bn towards cleaner fuel technology, trumpeting his Virgin Atlantic as the first airline in the world to fly on biofuels next year in a demonstration flight partnered by Boeing.

Virgin is also introducing a carbon offsetting scheme based on the position of a passenger’s seat on the plane, the argument being that the carbon footprint of bed space in its “upper class” section is larger than a seat in economy. Travel management companies such as ATP also offer variations in carbon offsetting calculations, taking into account business class seats and long-haul flights.

British Airways has argued that it was the first airline to offer an offset scheme and it plans to further refine its offering. Boeing’s development of its plastic-constructed Dreamliner 787 aircraft will, it says, become the standard bearer in green commercial aviation, reducing greenhouse gas emissions by being 20 per cent more fuel efficient.

Carbon offsetting businesses are working with companies to instigate large-scale offsetting plans across their entire business travel programmes. But as more of these businesses come into play, their would-be clients will want to start to compare and contrast their offerings. The common view in the business travel industry is that measuring energy efficiency for comparative purposes is an inexact art using current practices.

Paul Charles of Virgin says that will improve over the next three or four years. “What you are going to see a lot more is brand synergy, with brands choosing to work with each other on each stage of the journey,” says Mr Charles.

Will all this make the New York-London commuter more at ease with flying? Possibly, although the greater feelgood factor is more likely to come when companies reshape their social responsibility on business travel as a whole, rather than staying within the narrow, reactive carbon offsetting model.

The London-New York route will feel a good deal more acceptable when corporations start promoting themselves as pro-active green-concious businesses. As the pilot turns off the seat belt sign and the JFK-bound plane settles at an altitude of 30,000ft, the business traveller may take greater comfort in the fact that somewhere down at company HQ, a European colleague is getting on a train rather than a short-haul flight, others are getting into carbon neutral taxis, and the finance director is signing off on a new video and audio-conferencing facility.

Jonathan Shopley, of the CarbonNeutral Company, says some corporations are making a virtue out of a green-aware policy. “I sense there is some commercial advantage that’s being generated, to make up for the fact that you’re in a prisoner’s dilemma,” he says. “Actually, your actions alone are not going to save us from climate change, but they will give you some competitive positioning, and I think that’s a very interesting dynamic.”

But if disembarkation at JFK still brings with it a sense of guilt, business travellers will at least take comfort in the argument of many in the travel business that aviation is not as great a polluter of the atmosphere as is sometimes portrayed.

Giving up flying is not the solution, says Michelle di Leo, director of Flying Matters, a coalition of the travel industry advocating the importance of aviation. “It would fundamentally damage not just the UK economy but the economies of many other countries reliant on aviation and undermine their ability to invest to meet the challenges of climate change,” she says. “Solutions have to be economically as well as environmentally sustainable.”