by Alison Wiley
Asking Linda Quirk of Run 7 On 7 to buy carbon offsets for her extensive air travel (see last post) reminded me and my husband to buy our offsets for 2008 (we can estimate the carbon we’ll burn for the rest of the year).
Note: while I think that buying carbon offsets is necessary and makes a positive difference, I’m also clear that it barely holds a candle to lowering our carbon footprint, i.e. consuming less fossil fuels, in the first place. The premise of the Diamond-Cut Life is that we can have full, joyful lives with much less consumption of fossil fuels, etc. than the U.S. is currently consuming. I think my own life is a testament to that — though I still have a ways to go in reducing my consumption.
That said, Thor and I used the Climate Trust and their partner Carbon Counter to calculate our carbon emissions and then buy the offsets for them. Climate Trust is a non-profit here in Portland that we know has rigorous standards for the carbon-reducing projects it funds with the offsets. Their current featured project, for example, reduces the idling emissions of diesel freight trucks.
On the site, you can choose either the ‘fast track’ of estimating your carbon emissions, or a more detailed route of calculating your emissions based on your electricity use, home heating, miles driven and amount of air travel. Wonks that we are, we chose the latter. Our renewable energy purchases had already offset all of our electricity use for the year, and the biodiesel in our oil tank kept the carbon footprint of our home heating quite low.
Our air travel, predictably, created the bulk of our household’s carbon footprint — about two-thirds of it. (My aging parents live in Southern California, accounting for most of my air-miles). And our miles-driven has increased dramatically since I took my job in Salem, despite my wonderful carpool and the fact that I telework from home two days a week. (Thor commutes via bicycle and the TriMet bus.)
Even with all that, our carbon offsets for all of our carbon emissions in 2008 only came to $100. We went ahead and bought two years worth, i.e. $200. Thor and I believe that offsets are too cheap, that they should cost enough to be an actual deterrent to burning fossil fuels. The highly respected Stern Report estimated the costs of global warming at $9 trillion, with only a small window of 10-15 years to address the problem.
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