Greenies: Eat Carbon and Die
By Mitch Berg
I’m not one of those conservatives who are giddily ostentatious about driving a leather-plated Hummer with high-drag wheels while smoking cigars made from the pelts of endangered species.
Neither, naturally, am I one of those groaningly over-earnest Greens who’ve elevated “environmentalism” into an aescetic religion. Far from it.
I doubt I’d even call myself a “crunchycon”, because human beings should never be referred to as “crunchy”, unless you’re an M-1 Abrams driver and a carful of Al Quaeda have rounded the corner in front of you. No, I merely happen to like a cool house, and I bike to work, not out of any contrived whinging about global warming and its probably-fictional human causes, but because I, myself, happen to enjoy biking. A lot.
But after seeing Nih[i]list’s recreation of Algore’s footprint – 140 metric tons of carbon a year, compared to the average American’s roughly 9.5 tons – I decided to go check out Yahoo’s “Carbon Footprint Calculator“.
My – actually, the Berg Family’s – results?
You create 5.7 metric tons of CO2 per year.
Your impact is BELOW AVERAGE
Hm. Who’da thunk it?
(Although the only way, it seems, to really be acceptable is to stay childless and live in a tent in Hawaii, without a car, and reaching the mainland only via outrigger canoe. But only an outrigger made from a tree that died of natural causes, since chopping down a tree will increase your carbon footprint).
July 13th, 2007 at 5:02 am
Because of overseas business trips, I crank out over 40 tons a year. The ridiculous thing is that my trips aren’t made by choice so there’s really little or nothing I can to reduce my footprint. I think that people who take this test will actually be LESS likely to change their behavior once they realize what little impact using the right light bulbs or unplugging your cell phone really has.
July 13th, 2007 at 8:54 am
Exactly. You start to see the only way to get a “small footprint” is to live in a yurt, commute on a (handmade wicker) bicycle year-round, and eat only home-raised food.
As re the overseas trips – have you asked your company to pay (snggg…) for carbon (grnmph) offsets (BWAHAHAHAHAHAHAHA)?
July 13th, 2007 at 9:48 am
That’s a ridiculous survey. They assume every home (at least in Minnesota), causes an equal amount of CO2 to be emitted. I’m pretty sure that Carl Pohlad’s mansion uses more energy than a 100-square-foot super-insulated all-flourescent hovel.
What’s even more ridiculous is being worried about “carbon footprint” in the first place. If you want to save energy (and money), great. But if you cut your personal carbon footprint by 100%, you are only eliminating your portion of the 4% (human-caused CO2) of the 4% (CO2 percent of greenhouse gasses) of 1% (greenhouse gasses to total atmosphere) or 1 billionth(roughly) of 0.0016 PERCENT of the problem. Oh, and if everybody did that, the IPCC says that temperatures would START to come down 100 years from now. And eventually they would come down 0.06 degrees. Wow. When was the last time you heard /tomorrow’s/ temperature forecast given to two decimal places?
July 13th, 2007 at 11:25 am
I found it pretty funny, too. 95% of my heat is carbon neutral (I burn corn or wood pellets), the A/C is a hyper-efficient unit, the insulation is very good, the bulbs are 90% compact fluorescents, I telecommute most days and yet I put out an incredible amount just because of where we live and the size of the house and what we (rarely) drive. If I look at my carbon footprint in reality, it’d take our whole family well over a decade to equal what Gore needs to cool ONE of his multiple houses in the summer, much less his impact from flying, his entourage, etc.
As to global warming, I’m all for it! Historically, the warm periods have been the ones where civilization flourished.
July 13th, 2007 at 12:15 pm
hmm I’m over average at 11.6 tons a year. Have a townhouse, smaller car (average miles per year) and don’t fly.
Unless I sell my car I don’t see how I can get below average.
July 14th, 2007 at 3:54 pm
I really don’t see how you could have anything like an “acceptable” footprint in the eyes of the envirofascists, while maintaining anything like an acceptable Cylinder Index. Unless, of course, you never actually ever ran the snowmobile, the boat, the ATV, the personal watercraft, etc.
And that’d be just wrong…