carbon footprint
Nov. 22nd, 2006 11:12 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
tylikI've been thinking a lot about my carbon footprint recently. The last couple of years, what with moving into the city, switching over to biking as my primary mode of transportation, and reducing my living space, I've gotten down to something like the worldwide average by most calculators -- which is to say an awful lot less than the US average, and yet more than is sustainable. On the other hand, I've already flown more this year than years previous, and it looks as if, even if I really make an effort to avoid planes when I can, flying will be an unavaoidable part of my professional life and a cherished part of my personal life.
Which has me starting to look at carbon offsets, though I have somewhat mixed feelings about them. (Mixed, because it's too damned easy, because I'm a member of a fairly affluent society, and the offsets are pretty darned cheap. I don't want it to be that easy to be lazy.) But hey, paying people in economically deprived areas to engage in reforestation... I can get behind that. Though the next question becomes what my goal should be. Should I offset my airtravel, and try to otherwise keep my lifestyle at its current levels? Should I do that, and then buy offsets for my general footprint anyway, aiming for neutral? Hey, maybe I should go for carbon-negative... (Really, I feel pretty strongly about this, even though writing it this way strikes me as absurd.)
I am thinking of replacing the car with something tiny and vastly fuel efficient. (I've wanted such for years.) And I entertain myself by spending a lot of time playing with the footprint of the food I buy. It's non-trivial -- during the summer, I will often buy local and organic produce exclusively, summer being a blessed time for such things. (In theory, staple grains that require neither refrigeration nor rapid shipping may well be sustainable even shipped over fairly large distances. In practice... do you have any idea how hard it can be to get information on where your rye berries are from and how they got here?) In the winter... well, it's harder. I've long since decided that it's more important to me to support small sustainable farms, and local farms than organic certified farms. And local is frankly more important to the environment than organic. But I live in a slightly cold and rather dark place in winter, and sometimes I call my buying of bell peppers health, and sometimes hedonism (hey, they're only from BC... but the energy burned to heat and light those greenhouses has got to carry a pretty big footprint) but either way, I have not yet tried to confine myself to cabbage and root vegetables for the season. Maybe someday.
And some of it is just confusing. If I get a tiny little wondercar, I will likely give the Volvo to my sister. What is the net cost to the environment there? How do you weigh frozen versus fresh vegetables? Heck, I never really came up with an answer I was happy with for evaluating, in environmental terms, the relative merits of leather vs. sythetic shoes. (A somewhat academic question in my case, as taking care of my feet trumps environmental concerns for the moment, but still.)
Which has me starting to look at carbon offsets, though I have somewhat mixed feelings about them. (Mixed, because it's too damned easy, because I'm a member of a fairly affluent society, and the offsets are pretty darned cheap. I don't want it to be that easy to be lazy.) But hey, paying people in economically deprived areas to engage in reforestation... I can get behind that. Though the next question becomes what my goal should be. Should I offset my airtravel, and try to otherwise keep my lifestyle at its current levels? Should I do that, and then buy offsets for my general footprint anyway, aiming for neutral? Hey, maybe I should go for carbon-negative... (Really, I feel pretty strongly about this, even though writing it this way strikes me as absurd.)
I am thinking of replacing the car with something tiny and vastly fuel efficient. (I've wanted such for years.) And I entertain myself by spending a lot of time playing with the footprint of the food I buy. It's non-trivial -- during the summer, I will often buy local and organic produce exclusively, summer being a blessed time for such things. (In theory, staple grains that require neither refrigeration nor rapid shipping may well be sustainable even shipped over fairly large distances. In practice... do you have any idea how hard it can be to get information on where your rye berries are from and how they got here?) In the winter... well, it's harder. I've long since decided that it's more important to me to support small sustainable farms, and local farms than organic certified farms. And local is frankly more important to the environment than organic. But I live in a slightly cold and rather dark place in winter, and sometimes I call my buying of bell peppers health, and sometimes hedonism (hey, they're only from BC... but the energy burned to heat and light those greenhouses has got to carry a pretty big footprint) but either way, I have not yet tried to confine myself to cabbage and root vegetables for the season. Maybe someday.
And some of it is just confusing. If I get a tiny little wondercar, I will likely give the Volvo to my sister. What is the net cost to the environment there? How do you weigh frozen versus fresh vegetables? Heck, I never really came up with an answer I was happy with for evaluating, in environmental terms, the relative merits of leather vs. sythetic shoes. (A somewhat academic question in my case, as taking care of my feet trumps environmental concerns for the moment, but still.)
