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Serendipity: Leaving Small Carbon Footprints
The other day, the feature story on Investment News — the leading news for financial planners — was about carbon footprints. Something’s changing when the headline story on a financial Web site is about the environment: It has become mainstream. What exactly is a carbon footprint, and why should we care, as consumers or investors?
One clear definition is provided on a Web site that touts itself as “the home of the carbon footprint.” The term is “a measure of the impact our activities have on the environment, and in particular climate change. It relates to the amount of greenhouse gases produced in our day-to-day lives through burning fossil fuels for electricity, heating and transportation.”
Not surprisingly, no matter how careful we are in our attempts in daily life, citizens in developed countries create a phenomenally larger footprint than the rest of the world. If I grow my own veggies, bike to work and wear clothes past when friends have moved on to the latest fashion — and then fly away to an eco-vacation — I’ve pretty much supersized my impact on the Earth.
Our primary effects include home energy (27 percent), private transportation (10 percent), public transportation (3 percent) and holiday flights (6 percent). The remaining impacts are termed secondary impacts — ones over which we have limited or no control. They include food (5 percent), clothing and other personal (4 percent), car manufacture and delivery (7 percent), house and contents (9 percent), recreation and leisure (14 percent), financial services (3 percent) and our share of public services (12 percent).
Why should we care? I would venture a guess that most people who take the time to think about life goals include “leaving the world a better place” in their top tier. But no matter our altruism in other ways, it’s difficult for someone in a developed country — and increasingly in a developing country — to accomplish this, given the effect of our carbon use on the Earth.
The carbon footprint Web site has good tips on how we can reduce or mitigate our footprints. One way is to give ourselves or a friend the gift of carbon offsets. This feel-good gift involves using a simple calculator to estimate how much carbon is burned in supporting one’s lifestyle: auto, flight or home footprint.
My son did this for my birthday. He then made a donation in the amount of my carbon use to an organization that would plant sufficient trees to offset my print. If you’re concerned about the reliability of the Web sites, another option is to buy and then retire allowances in the European cap-and-trade scheme.
The Green Century Mutual Funds are taking footprints to a new level. They hired an independent consultant to analyze the carbon footprints of each of the companies in which their Green Century Balanced Fund (GCBLX) invests. According to Investment News, carbon emissions per million dollars of revenue of the individual companies in GCBLX had a carbon footprint of 126, which is two-thirds less than that of the Standard & Poor’s 500 stock index.
As an economist, I do have some reluctance for this type of social consciousness solution to a critical and monumental problem. That is, most of us will free-ride our carbon use until we are forced to pay. But maybe education and social consciousness are necessary first steps. It’s the way we’ve ameliorated other problems such as littering (remember the public advertisements to “not be a litterbug”?). We go as far as we can with carrots before resorting to sticks.
Little by little, we can learn to consume responsibly, invest responsibly and remember the joy of sauntering in the summer sun, leaving only noncarbonated physical footprints.
— Karen Telleen-Lawton’s column is a mélange of observations supporting sustainability. Graze her writing and excerpts from Canyon Voices: The Nature of Rattlesnake Canyon at www.CanyonVoices.com.
Comments
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» on 08.15.09 @ 08:23 PM
My goal is to have a carbon footprint to beat all records a size 100FF
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» on 08.16.09 @ 02:14 AM
Gimme a break. Carbon credits are a scam created by Al Gore. People who follow this thinking have been hit in the head with a stupid stick.
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» on 08.16.09 @ 06:27 AM
This columnist obviously lives in the upper strata of SB’s privileged elite (frequent vacation air travel, hiring landscapers to irrigate her oak trees, bemoaning an invasion of ants into an expensive irrigation system controller, etc…) and while she might mean well in writing about sustainability, she’s just assuaging her guilty conscience and wringing her uncalloused hands about “consuming responsibly.” Those who really believe in sustainability don’t just calculate their excessive footprints and then tithe to a greenwashing outfit which says it’ll plant trees to ameliorate those excesses, and they don’t just “talk the talk.” They practice what they preach. When Ms. T-L resolves to stay home, gets to know her own watershed and its ecological requirements, stops even noticing what fashions her friends are wearing, and when she begins to really practice what she preaches, is when her her columns may begin to be relevant and believable.
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» on 08.16.09 @ 04:18 PM
First off as a dedicated tree lover, no make that fanatical tree lover, I encourage everyone every where to burn as much fossil fuel as they can. Our atmosphere is to low in CO2 and that is why we keep having these recurring ice ages. Plus my beloved trees and all vegetation need CO2 to grow. Please do your part for trees and give them the carbon dioxide they need to grow bigger, stronger and more proliferate than ever. It will also help mother nature warm things up a bit as well.
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» on 08.17.09 @ 06:13 AM
I’ve seen the size of this woman’s house that would have the rest of us live in shoeboxes….she blows her cover by calling a “gift of carbon offsets” for yourself or a friend a “feel good” gift. I mean isn’t that what it’s all about? Feeling good? Imagine Christmas morning and receiving a box of carbon credits in your stocking. Wow. I think I would prefer ashes from the coal I had burned that year.
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» on 08.17.09 @ 06:20 AM
Imagine Karen’s eco-friends, who she obviously loves to impress with how green she is, going to her house for a dinner party and getting a booklet of carbon credits at the door. “Don’t worry I bought carbon credits for everyone so don’t feel bad about the outdoor heaters and the size of my living room and I grew all these vegetables in my back yard”. I truly am greener than thou. Meanwhile the temperature of the planet continues it’s natural cycle of cooling into the next ice age while the greenies take credit for reversing the crisis.
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» on 08.17.09 @ 09:10 AM
Sarcastic layabouts and cheap shot artists abound here. Where is insight and fresh perspective from either position indicated by the comments here?
So what if she’s a hypocrite? She is at least addressing an issue and examining some, if not all of her part in it.
On the environmentalist side she just will never be valid until she studies her watershed. Right. That’s likely to be a part of the citizenship test when?
On the other hand, calling carbon credits a scam ignores the success that cap and trade regimes had with acid rain, and the fact that other countries already had them before you even knew Al Gore wanted one. You probably think he’s doing it just to make money, which would be very capitalist of him.
By attempting to ignore or make light of climate issues, the right has missed the opportunity to seize economic high ground by leading the world in reinvention of energy and transportation sectors for the next hundred years, instead ceding real leadership in both financial and improving standards of living for billions to India, China or Brazil.
As to the call for more CO2 to benefit trees, that isn’t even good humor, as the resulting heat is, under certain models, likely to trigger another ice age.
If you have all this time on your hands to make chippy comments, spend some of it getting educated.
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» on 08.17.09 @ 01:32 PM
Oh right, Oatrick. I make a facetious comment about CO2 and that’s because I’m uninformed? Gimmy a break pal. Cap and trade started in the LA basin to deal with smog long before your friends picked up on it to solve their high sulfur content coal problems (acid rain) in Europe. As far as the CO2 argument goes we as a species produce less than termites. Get a new religion. Scientists are still trying to figure out why global warming always starts BEFORE CO 2 rises and why once the locked up CO2 in permafrost gets liberated we don’t go into a runaway greenhouse event. Something causes climate cycles that is separate from our biosphere and something in our biosphere moderates the effects the cycles cause. No one, not even Al, knows why or is even close to an answer. To have the whole human species come off sounding like invaders from another planet trying in vain to not violate the “prime directive” is ludicrous and not supported by good science. Karen, for better or worse, is the uninformed lemming here just following the latest fad. Yer heading in that direction if all yer gonna do is make uninformed statements about how uninformed others are.
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» on 08.17.09 @ 02:27 PM
I always appreciate Karen Telleen-Lawton’s essays. They are thoughtful and very well written.
It’s clear that not everyone believes in a “green ethic” as strongly as she does.
It is also clear that some readers do not believe in any clear responsibility to any part of nature, the earth, or natural resources at all.
That’s their right. It makes Noozhawk a vibrant forum for lively discussion.
I only hope that those who disagree with Telleen-Lawton could demonstrate similar
eloquence and insight in their replies.
Heat is okay, but shedding new light is usually even better.
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» on 08.17.09 @ 08:18 PM
Lee, explain “green ethic”. But please don’t give me some dopy partisan talking point explanation. Please do shed some light and explain in basic scientific terms what you mean. I’ll give you the benefit of the doubt, if you can explain in a non partisan way.
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» on 08.19.09 @ 10:37 AM
when Al Gore and other rich greenies give up their private jets, their mansions, their world travel instead of massaging their liberal guilt by paying for carbon “credits” somewhere else in the world, well, THEN I’ll think of using them as an example of responsible living. Reminds me a bit of the rich who paid for poor US citizens to take their sons’ spots in the Civil War.
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