Cornelia Carrier: Measuring My Carbon Footprint
Posted at 7:08 pm, July 30th, 2007
“Measure your impact on climate change” read the subject line of the e-mail sent to me by The Nature Conservancy on April 30th. It sat there in my inbox unopened until last week, because I dreaded thinking about my own contribution. It is so easy to be against global warming, but what sacrifices are you willing to make?
I imagined I would score pretty well even though South Carolina ranks fourth in percentage growth of CO2 (45%) since 1990 to 2004. Luckily, I live downtown so I walk to many places. I drive a Mazda that gets 27 miles to the gallon in the city with the AC on. Certainly not a hybrid, but not an SUV either. I keep my thermostat at 80 in the summer and 68 in the winter. I recycle. I use energy efficient light bulbs. I turn off my power strips at night. Still I dreaded my score.
After opening that e-mail, I got in the swing and measured my carbon footprint on other sites, such as this one, this one, this one, and this one.
On most I scored below average but on one I scored average and up popped a little figure rising from a cloud of emissions. My pie chart shows that the majority of my carbon output is transportation and since I don’t drive much, it has to be my air travel. So if I want to reduce my carbon footprint, I will have to give up some of my air travel. That will be a big sacrifice, and I’m not sure I’m ready to make it. Remember the flak about Al Gore flying to his Life Earth concerts?
So like Gore, I’ll buy carbon offsets. But which ones? How do you know that if you pay for a carbon offset, something is done to reduce green house gas emissions? According to an article in the Christian Science Monitor, you can’t be sure.
So racked with guilt, I thought about canceling future travel, then I found “Flying in the face of global warming – to fly or not to fly.” The news there is more encouraging. I had thought flying was a huge contributor to global warming but this site says it contributes only 5 percent for now, but flying is growing at a fantastic rate. So I’ll take my flight to California in August and keep looking online for the latest word on how I might make amends.
October 10th, 2007 at 9:19 pm |
I am just a simple person, but I would like to point out that the majority of the sites you mentioned do not have very comprehensive surveys to identify a person’s actual carbon contribution. The only site that seems to be accurate was the EPA’s site. The other sites seemed to be geared toward selling the visitor, most likely not even credible or worse fraudulent carbon credits, advertising that all it would take to make the average American “carbon neutral” would be $200 or so per person. Very little was mentioned about the devastating effect of air travel, one site indicating that the impact that a person creates by flying can be reversed by donating $7! If the average American was to buy into this, there would be no moral grounds for reducing their time in the air, since the financial cost indicates a far lesser degree of environmental cost, than that of driving. There is at this time no known technology that can eliminate the need for fossil fuels in air travel. Furthermore all advancements in air travel efficiency is directly related to occupancy allotments, which with the ever increasing popularity and need, in your case, of air travel is unlikely to reduce air travel carbon emissions significantly or at all. Just doing more than the guy next door is not enough, just doing a little is not enough every one of us must commit ourselves to living lifestyles that are conservative in every way possible. I hope as some one with more influence than most you would take the responsibility to inform the public of the severity of the situation and the extent that every one has to change their lives.