Green Eye for the Great Buy - Go GHG-Free!

So what are you to do? Happily, the apocalyptic slow burn that is climate change is not totally irreversible (just yet), so if we all hop to it, each individual person can make a difference. There are lots of resources to help keep cool in style.

One of these is the CarbonNeutral Company. Their goal is to enable people to take positive and practical action in the fight against climate change, and they have information on a bevy of carbon-neutral lifestyle choices, from flying to driving to staying at home. There's a section on gift-buying for the CarbonNeutralite in your life, and even a way to have a climate-neutral wedding. Whether you're buying for yourself, someone else or the love of your life, each purchase helps invest in carbon-reducing or neutralizing projects. But they can also insure your day-to-day life doesn't pump greenhouse gasses into our fragile atmosphere either.

Don't know how much your daily activities and lifestyle contribute to climate change? Crunch some numbers with their carbon calculator, and then neutralize what you can with a few easy clicks. For example, each North American produces an average of 19.9 tons of CO2 per year. With CarbonNeutral's help, you can dedicate 27 trees to one of four forests of your choosing and be a carbon-neutral citizen -- easy at that. Why trees? Well, they grow with the benefit of sunlight and water and absorb carbon dioxide and emit oxygen in a process familiar to most of us called photosynthesis. More trees=less carbon, which means less greenhouse-effect-causing gas in the atmosphere, which means a cooler planet. Makes sense, no? If trees aren't your thing, CarbonNeutral also partners with various renewable energy projects to build the industry to help ween the world off fossil fuels. Either way, there will be less carbon emissions floating about because of you, which is something to feel good about!

Meantime, summer is just around the corner; time for vacation, lazy days on the beach, and catching up with friends and family both near and far. To accomplish this, many of us will take a little jaunt out into the world, and most of who take off for a quick trip or long weekend will need to drive to get somewhere at some point. But as it has been well-documented, neither driving nor flying is a good way to help cool things down, atmospherically speaking. So what are we to do?

The solution is simple: stop traveling in anything with an internal combustion engine, and, while you’re at it, take fewer breaths. All of these contribute greenhouse gasses to the atmosphere, trapping heat in and warming things up. Simple, yes; easy, no. My solution sounds like a bit much to me, too; instead, we can recommend a few, much easier ways to keep living and traveling until we can figure something else out.

Certified Clean Car is another entrant in the field, and works with a similar system of car calculators and cost-conserving carbon cutting. They have the extra option of cleaning your business’s cars as well, so you can all carpool cool. The calculator knows my car’s gas mileage, and pronounced me a type 1 driver (the lowest impact rating) after I ran the necessary numbers through it. The numbers came out a bit different (this one said I produce more GHG’s than at Driving Green, and gave me the numbers in pounds per year instead of metric tons) and offered to offset them for $34.99 – they calculate by levels: if I drove twice as much as I do, I’d be a level 4 driver and it would cost me $84.99 a year.

Climate Care provides a similar service, offering offsets for home, business, car or airplane travel, or gifts. Based in the UK, where the tonnes are offset by pounds, it takes about £10 to take care of 4,000 miles of driving in an average sized car; £20 will get you three short or one long airplane ride. Each ton costs £7.50 (about $15 US) and goes to a variety of programs, all across the world: Providing finance for renewable energy cooking stoves in schools in India, installing efficient lighting in households in South Africa, and restoring a rainforest in Uganda are just a few. Climate Care also works directly with British Airways to offset air travel emissions on the UK-based carrier.

Sustainable Travel International, a non-profit dedicated to promoting responsible tourism and supporting sustainable development, now offers MyClimate. It a carbon-emission-reduction-service with an eco-tourism bent that allows travelers, corporations, travel service providers, and academic institutions to take action to fight climate change by investing in World Wildlife Federation-certifed carbon offset projects that help to neutralize the negative impacts of their air and ground travel. Dealing exclusively through air travel, they have a simple, straightforward calculator that figures by the mile. For example, with $15, they can compensate up to 1000 pounds of CO2. From this amount at least 80% of the revenues you invest flow into the climatic protection projects. They invests only in renewable energy and energy efficiency projects (they're concerned about the long-term effects of things like carbon sinks and sequestration projects) and each program has to contribute to sustainable development on a local level. They have programs in Costa Rica, Eritrea, India, South Africa and here in the US.

While the carbon-offset industry is still too young to determine the overall impact, it's definitely growing, and definitely headed in the right direction. While it's not the end-all, be-all, one-big-solution for climate change, we’ll take anything that helps things cool down around here. It supports renewable energy, grows more trees and is affordable, quick and easy; in the time it took to read the this article, you could be the proud proprietor of a climate-neutral lifestyle.