Recently in Environment Category

B and I crossed the Pacific Ocean. Or rather, we just got to India. The longest leg of our journey was 14 hours, from SFO to Hong Kong. We slept much of the way, then watched movies (her), read (me), and played video games (us),

We bitch about plane travel--the food, the cost, the security restrictions, the poor customer service--but it's pretty amazing how things have changed. We both have family stories of relatives traveling from India to the UK by ship. It seems like another world. B's uncle did that journey sometime in the 1950s; we talk about the journey as a curiosity from the past. He flew back to India, decades later, married to a British woman; it's the marriage that people remarked on at the time, not the mode of transportation. Air travel has become utterly mundane; how else would you get around?

It's no joke that global warming is an inconvenient truth. Air travel is currently responsible for somewhere upwards of 3% of human-generated emissions, but is rising swiftly; the IPCC fears it may grow to as high as 15% by 2050. Assuming we actually want to slow down global warming, the facts seem inconveniently biased against air travel as we know it.

But what are the alternatives? We keep hearing of aviation tech efficiencies, but there's been no magic bullet yet. If there were, could we replace the entire global airline fleet in a matter of years?

Which brings me back to ships. It takes about a week and a half to cross the Pacific Ocean by freighter -- each hour by plane turned into almost a full day of travel. I'm tempted to try it sometime. It could be a way of exploring the past, or possibly a glimpse at part of an alternate future. Either way, it'd be a very different way of interacting with vast swaths of our "flyover" planet.

I've launched a new website, Offset Consumer, to help consumers learn about researching and buying voluntary personal carbon offsets. Please check it out.

After watching An Inconvenient Truth, I pulled up a carbon calculator and tried plugging in our household numbers. B and I don't own a car, live in a relatively dense city, and rarely use heat or cooling. I was shocked to discover that not only were we not low-carbon emitters, but that we were actually in the 90th percentile of most carbon-spewing Americans that year. Oh, the shame! Those pesky plane trips, most to visit family, had thrown us over the top, and turned us into the moral equivalent of Hummer drivers.

We've been working on lowering our carbon footprints, and have gotten much more involved in work to lower everyone's footprints through systemic change. But we also decided to buy carbon offsets, as part of the mix. Offsets are complicated. The more I read, the more clear it became that while offsets really do work (on a micro level), offsets products also vary wildly in quality and price--but nobody (besides the climate science geeks) are talking about it. It's been incredibly frustrating to see how little information there is out there for normal folks contemplating buying offsets.

The Offset Consumer website is aimed at reducing that information gap. It addresses questions everyone needs to know about offsets (pros and cons, and how to evaluate them), recommended carbon calculators, as well as a meta-analysis of top offset providers based on five separate carbon offset provider evaluators.

I'm particularly happy with the list of recommended providers. Building the list has forced me do more homework, and I'm confident in being able to tell folks they should consider getting offsets from CarbonCounter, a Portland nonprofit with a great mix of high quality offset products, at a surprisingly low price.

The process of researching the site has also helped me come to terms about my feelings about offsets. I started off more skeptical of offsets, but I'm now very confident that the top providers really do divert emissions from the atmosphere that would have been emitted, had it not been for the funded project. Global warming is a moral and humanitarian crisis. For those who are responsible (and I say this as someone very much in that camp), buying high-quality voluntary offsets can--and possibly should--go hand in hand with reducing personal emissions and working on better systemic solutions.

Try a calculator for yourself. The numbers may surprise you.

Yum. City CarShare, our local carsharing coop, just got its first smart fortwo cars. I love the way they’ve maintained their values, working closely with community groups, supporting transit and livable cities, and investing in cars like the Prius, fortwo, Mini Cooper, and Toyota Yaris — all of which are on the government’s list of the most fuel-efficient cars.

(This, in light of the way carsharing industry behemoth Zipcar is rapidly moving away from its greener roots, and stocking earth-unfriendly cars like BMWs and Mustangs. What use market share, if you give up on your values getting there?)

A senior official at the Vatican recently discussed his list of seven mortal “social” sins:

• “bioethical” violations such as birth control
• “morally dubious” experiments such as stem cell research and DNA manipulation
• drug abuse
• polluting the environment
• contributing to widening divide between rich and poor
• excessive wealth
• creating poverty

“A person that commits a mortal sin risks burning in hell unless absolved through confession and penitence,” (emphasis mine) per AP’s description of Catholic theology. The media’s been particularly fixated on the environmental angle.

While the list doesn’t carry the weight of the Pope or the Vatican as a whole, it’s interesting to see a massive 2000-year-old institution working to amend points of theology, particularly those of personal sin, to adapt to changing understandings of the world. Not all Church policy positions (e.g. opposition to the Iraq War) get dealt with at the level of God-will-condemn-your-soul-to-hell mortal sin.

(And isn’t it fun to be able to change God’s rules as you go, like when the LDS Church suddenly declared in 1978 that men of African descent—but not women of any race—could become priests?)

I started eating a primarily lacto-vegetarian diet about a decade ago, driven primarily by selfishly anthropocentric environmental concerns. The more I read, the more obvious it became that eating lower down on the food chain’s more sustainable for human societies, because it uses fewer resources than eating meat.

Over the past year, I’ve been reading more about animal rights and global warming. Animal rights is clearly linked to vegetarian (or better yet, vegan) diets, but global warming? The data’s depressing.

Food writer Mark Bittman summarizes some of the latest findings in a recent New York Times article, “Rethinking the Meat-Guzzler”:

• global demand for meat is skyrocketing
• raising livestock for meat is incredibly land- and energy-inefficient
• the FAO estimates that livestock production causes more greenhouse gases than transportation; sources include animal manure, methane, and trees felled to provide pastureland for animals
• Americans eat way too much meat as it is, and about twice the recommended daily allowance of protein

According to an often-cited University of Chicago study, switching from a meat-based to a vegan diet eliminates about 1.5 tons of CO2 per year. While the implications of this have been widely debated by environmentalist number-crunchers, it’s clear that eating an increasingly vegan diet is a useful (and easy) way to help ensure more usable croplands for all humans, and a lighter carbon impact on the planet.