08 Jul 2007 0814H

Some notes on Live Earth and my impact

There are things everyone can do. Here are some things I’m looking at.

Consuming water in disposable plastic bottles? Crazy unsustainable. Must stop. Do you drink Dasani? Odds are good that’s your municipal water being resold back to you. Just use your tap water in a stainless steel bottle: unlike polycarbonate bottles, it doesn’t have bisphenol-A, which leaches into the water and potentially can damage your reproductive health.

I don’t actually drive a lot, but I have a huge carbon footprint from air travel due to the nature of work. At this moment, I could purchase $1375 worth of carbon offsets to assuage my guilty conscience, or pay a lump sum $16,500, which could go towards running a wind farm, or harvesting farm methane, or both. (I wonder if this is billable.) Less travel and more internet work means a smaller carbon footprint, but in those cases where it is unavoidable, they need to be built into the cost structure.

We have replaced all the light bulbs in the house with CF bulbs, except for the few desk lamps that run off halogen, and those I’m going to replace with LED lamps. It’s true that you can’t just throw out dead CF bulbs — there’s mercury in them, don’t want that leaching into the groundwater — but, they fail infrequently, so it’ll be a while before you have to figure out what to do with them. There aren’t any plasma tv sets or CRTs in the house, almost everything is LCD now, and all the computers are laptops now, which doesn’t pull as many watts as say, a giant honking desktop machine.

One of the big things in the back of my mind is education among Chinese consumers about environment and conservation. When you think about how historically tied to the land people have been — the language itself is rife with metaphors from nature — and now, how much consumption there is, and rush to consume resources for the burgeoning middle class, not the least of which at risk is the sustainability of local and ocean fisheries, it’s pretty staggering to think that really little to no effort has been made to design communications around these issues for the Chinese consumer. We can start in Chinese communities right here in North America.

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