Recently in Personal 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.

When I first started working, I decided to give away about a month’s income (about 8% before taxes) every year to nonprofits. Working in the tech sector during the dot.com boom, I figured I’d always have more money than time, and that I could be most useful bankrolling groups doing work I believed in.

It was relatively easy at first. My costs were low, certainly low enough to give away a bit. I think back to how freely I pulled out my checkbook at the time, and how much I gave without thinking about it. As I got older, costs started going up, and I realized that I needed to get serious saving for the future. At the same time, I realized I enjoyed volunteering, and that small groups sometimes need manpower more than they need money. The more time I gave, the more my donation rates slipped. B and I got married, we bought a house, and took on a mortgage.

As we were doing our 2006 taxes, we realized that as two white-collar working adults without dependents, we’d only given away about 4% of our income in the past year. It was embarrassingly low. (The average household earning under $10,000 a year gives away 5.2%.)

Over the past year, we’ve been working to change that pattern, giving away more to groups we already donated to (e.g. Asha for Education), and becoming first-time donors to groups we admire but have never supported financially (e.g. Stop Prisoner Rape). As I finished our 2007 taxes in April, I was happy to see that we made it to 10% in the past year.

I’m inspired by the stories at Bolder Giving in Extraordinary Times, which advocates for substantially higher levels of giving by those of us privileged enough to do so. (Which, per the Global Rich List, is pretty much everyone I know.) I’m not there yet, but it’s something to aspire to.

I was one of the judges for UC Berkeley School of Information’s 2008 Master’s final projects competition this afternoon, helping pick the best among the projects in the information systems implementation track. We saw several really interesting student projects. Most of the presenters held up under the heat and stress, and I enjoyed seeing the level of attention to detail that the best project teams brought to the table. Thankfully, the judging wasn’t all that difficult; Peter Merholz, Jeff Ubois, and I came to a decision pretty quickly. The winning project team will be informed during their commencement ceremony tomorrow.

Seeing the students getting ready to graduate was bittersweet. I took a leave of absence from the school’s masters program nine years ago. Getting into the program, then called the School of Information Management and Systems (SIMS), was all I wanted to do with my life. I was admitted as part of the second entering class, but eventually left school to try to launch a startup around a class project that was gaining traction online. Though it was clearly the right choice to make, I still feel like I gave up on something really important. I’m glad to be able to be a part of the school’s extended family, through links with past professors, fellow alumni, and current staff.

The Chronicle ran a story today about how the “Next big quake could be worse than 1906”, based on new predictions from seismologists and quake loss experts:

“The next major earthquake on the Hayward Fault - inevitable anytime now, experts say - will be the Bay Area’s own Hurricane Katrina, affecting more than 5 million people, causing losses to homes and businesses of at least $165 billion and total economic losses of more than $1.5 trillion, scientists warn. And that’s from ground shaking alone. If major fires break out - think 1906 in San Francisco - the total losses would be far higher, they said.”

B and I have been thinking a bit about earthquake safety, but we have some way to go. We’ve hit up our local earthquake safety guides (72 hours and Disaster Resistant Berkeley), and have the beginnings of a go bag ready, but we have some ways to go.

So far, we’ve prepped:

• Store-bought first aid kit
• Flashlight w/batteries
• Battery-powered radio, w/batteries
• Non-perishable food for each person, for three days
• Scissors
• Warm clothes
• Hats
• Hygiene products
• Toilet paper
• Facial tissue
• Spare glasses
• Plastic bags
• Paper
• Pen/pencils
• 3 gallons of water per person
• Rain gear

But per the safety guides, based on our needs, they still recommend:

• Extra regular medication (replaced regularly)
• Eye wash solution to flush the eyes or as general decontaminant
• Dust mask
• Pocket knife
• Extra keys
• Phone card
• Cash
• Quarters for pay phones
• Aspirin and anti-diarrheal meds
• Bedding or sleeping bags
• Blanket
• Tape
• Whistle
• Copies of insurance and ID cards
• Written instructions for how to turn off gas, electricity, and water if authorities advise doing so
• Written contact info for all family and family emergency contacts
• Family plan for where to meet after a disaster if your home becomes unsafe.

Just looking at the list is depressing. Eye wash solution? No doubt I’d appreciate being able to wash out my eye when dust from my crumbling home gets in, but needing to put all this together makes me feel like a Y2K survivalist.

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.

I'm in Kolkata, India, for my cousin's wedding. I've been enjoying being part of a Big Fat Bengali Wedding, but I was hoping to spend the weekend at the Kolkata Book Fair, the third largest book fair in the world. This year's theme was American literature, featuring guests like Paul Theroux, Bharati Mukherjee, and a delegation of American poets; I was particularly interested in seeing what kind of reception they'd get.

Unfortunately, the event’s been cancelled at the last minute, due to a decision by the Kolkata High Court to bar the organizers from holding the event at the planned venue, due to a high likelihood of environmental damage. (The organizers had been kicked out of their previous venue the year before for the same reason, and hadn't done adequate planning to find a space capable of handling the popular event's high-intensity noise and environmental impacts.) The cancellation's been devastating to writers, bibliophiles, and book-related businesses getting ready for the biggest book fair in Asia.

So what of the American delegation? The local book community's helped the Americans reschedule many events at universities and bookstores around town, and the US Embassy assures us that all isn't lost.

Most Kolkata residents are disappointed at the turn of events; so am I, but unlike local bibliophiles, I may not get another chance to make it back to Kolkata in late January for the fair. In the meantime, I'm making do hitting up local bookstores, making my suitcase heavier, book by book.