So I’m sitting on the plane, somewhere in the middle of the pacific. The consistent view of ocean and more ocean is creeping me out; I can’t help but consider the thought of our plane falling from the sky and landing in the middle of nowhere. I’m too tired to read, so my attention is volleying between spying over the shoulder of my seat mate’s laptop while she watches Gossip Girl, and images of surfboarding and swimming on the big screen (Hawaiian Airlines shows a cultural programming when they aren’t playing movies). I finally settle on the images of the ocean, and to the melody of the slack guitar. Something is already different. It is reminding of me when I flew Thai Airlines on my way to Thailand, the cultural immersion begins when you step on the plane. I’m feeling myself slip into the idea of island time, and am craving the experience of claiming words like Aloha and Mahalo as my own.
I’ve been catching some slack (and for good reason) for the carbon footprint I’m creating while on this trip. In the name of full transparency, I’ll be tracking my carbon footprint as I go. I’ve just begun researching carbon calculators and am learning there is one main feature that distinguishes them. Do you want to go macro and get an overall idea for your carbon footprint for the year, or do you want to go micro, and calculate the details of your carbon footprint? I going for the micro management program, as well as the convenience of tracking as I go. I’m toggling between two iphone applications: Carbon Tracker (personal addition) uses a GPS system that you begin and end with each leg of your trip, and Twavel (made by Netscribe). Ed Begley says it’s “fantastic,” so I have high hopes.
If you are into the quick fix of getting an estimate of your early carbon foot print, you may want to check out the iphone application Carbon Calc. The application summarizes your carbon debt and then links you to paypal and “lets” you pay off your guilt right there and then. Something about this rubs me the wrong way. I see the upside, in theory, people are consciously giving a few bucks that will either fund sustainable technology, or plant trees in the Amazon. But I can’t get around that this feels like a cheap quick way of feeling like you did something (and note taken: this is hopefully step one…step two is waiting to be created…by you.) My pet peeve with all of the calculators I found to date, they don’t calculate public vs. private transportation (dude, I want my karma points).
Meanwhile, an interesting side note: according to Carbon Cal: The average American footprint is 23.4 tons, the European average footprint is 11 tons, and the world average footpint is 4.3 tons. Stats like that inspire the guilt, so off I go to find a carbon offset program I believe in. I’ve done a fair amount of research, and felt attacked by a lot of clever marketing campaigns. My suspicoun is that it is an easy market for an entrepreneur to make a quick buck without doing the work they are claiming to do.
I put a call out to Twitter asking for recommendation for trusted resources @Chamako suggested
A Grassroots Alternative to Carbon Offsets that reccommends the following:
Instead of quantifying offsets, we are encouraging individuals and organizations to take responsibility for their own emissions by helping these projects expand their reach. And, we are able to promote a much broader range of projects that address climate change. For instance, a project in Ecuador teaches tens of thousands of children about climate change and ways to combat it. We can’t translate this into tons of carbon, but it can result in a future generation of green voters, consumers, and policymakers. Other projects from the Environmental Foundation for Africa are working not only to provide solar electricity to schools in villages in Sierra Leone, but also to train technical school students in their installation and maintenance.
A few other submissions I appreciated were these two lists that compare various carbon offset programs:
@karpul suggested EcoBusiness Links: Carbon Emissions Offset Directory
@EDF_InnovEx suggested their (Environmental Defense Fund) CarbonOffsetList.org directory
Onward! And….Mahalo!
P.S. Just in case you don’t “remember” what a carbon foot print is: here’s the easy explanation from wikipedia:
“A carbon footprint is “the total set of GHG (greenhouse gas) emissions caused directly and indirectly by an individual, organization, event or product” (UK Carbon Trust 2008). An individual, nation, or organization’s carbon footprint is measured by undertaking a GHG emissions assessment. Once the size of a carbon footprint is known, a strategy can be devised to reduce it.
Carbon offsets, or the mitigation of carbon emissions through the development of alternative projects such as solar or wind energy or reforestation, represent one way of managing a carbon footprint.”
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