Journo

And You Thought Shoe Size Was Complicated

I've often wondered at the cynical folks who scoff at Al Gore (and countless other celebs of the Green movement, like Leo DiCaprio) for flying in jets while touting environmentally friendly measures like energy saving light bulbs, or, as Jack Johnson recommended, surfing as a mode of transportation. It seems like overly negative criticism in the face of so much else to whine about.

So not all celebs know their stuff when it comes to environmentalism, but at least they have their heart in the right place (or their PR people, anyway). Off-setting the CO₂ emissions of a flight from New York to Los Angeles, for example, only costs about $8 worth of tree-planting--and airlines are now making it easy to add that fee onto the price of your ticket.

And so I thought--what exactly is my carbon footprint, and how would I offset it? Could I afford to it on my current budget?

I took a look online for easy and comprehensive carbon footprint calculators, to see exactly what I sending up into the atmosphere every year and how I could remedy it. There are some things I can control: energy-saving light bulbs, recycling what I can, minimizing my time in cars and maximizing my time on foot. Well, I can't afford a car-I guess that makes me pretty green.

There are other things I can't control: how inefficient my apartment is when it comes to heat, the recycling Providence does not provide, the car I must borrow or rent when I want to take a vacation. Sure, I turn off lights when I'm not in the room and I try to keep the heat low at night. I even buy organic when I can (although the walk to Whole Foods is not as fun as I originally expected).

• The Carbon Footprint online claims to be the best calculator on the web, and it certainly seemed the most thorough. My carbon footprint was 5.14 tonnes of CO₂, which translates to 12160 lb. (from now on I'll list everything in pounds, although every website uses something different--tons, tonnes, pounds). The average US footprint, according to this site, is 44970 lb. So I'm doing well. Offsetting my total footprint for the year would only coast €56 in donations to tree-planting foundations, or about $82.00 in US currency. Not bad to make up for a year of garbage, transportation, and energy.
• Nature.org didn't think I was doing so well, at 40000 lb of CO₂ versus the US average of 54000 lb.
• The EPA was much more generous, and I clocked in at 10,760 lb of CO_2.
• Earth Day measures their footprints in biological acres, which is kind of cool and yet not very positive. If everyone lived like me, according to the site, we'd need 4.1 planets instead of just the one we've got. I cost 18 acres a year, versus the normal American average of 24.
• BP measured it at 8818 lb versus a US average of 40960 lb. Al Gore's own site, An Inconvenient Truth, was even more lenient: 4500 lb, versus a national average of 15000 lb.
• Yahoo! Green measures my footprint at 9200 lb of CO₂, versus the national average of 18880 lb.

Even the advocate groups can't decide if I'm a good guy or a bad guy. I felt pretty good about myself until the Earth Day people reprimanded me. Can't we all just get along?