Reducing Your Carbon Footprint

According to the folks at CarbonFootprint.com

Carbon Footprint is a measure of the impact human activities have on the environment in terms of the amount of green house gases produced, measured in units of carbon dioxide.

The idea is to calculate, reduce and offset you carbon footprint. The web site has a nifty carbon footprint calculator (make sure to click on the USA flag to switch from the default UK setting to the US settings.

You can easily get your home energy usage from Madison Gas and Electric (MGE) 's web site by registering for an online account. And one of the ways to offset your carbon footprint (and when I say 'your' I mean 'our') is to buy green energy. You can sign up for more wind power at MG&E and for $10/month offset 600 kilowatt-hours/month worth of CO2 emissions (typical household usage).

There are a bunch of fairly easy ways to reduce your footprint such as changing to compact fluorescent bulbs or turning off appliances when not in use. The city of Ames, Iowa has a pretty comprehensive list of energy use by appliance.

Here's a story about community cars.

Here's some ways to reduce your secondary impact that you cause through your buying habits:

Try to buy things made closer to home. Reduce your consumption of meat. Don't buy bottled water if your tap water is safe to drink (especially if it has been shipped from far away).
Buy local fruit and vegetables.

You can also pay to offset your carbon footprint. I don't know much about offsets. A quick look around the Internet reveals the potential for scams, however, so caution is advised.

That's it for now, feel free to offer your ideas - please be specific. And, no, I don't do all these things myself, yet anyway.