In their April 15th issue, the Seattle Times newspaper called upon its readership to take their challenge to reduce personal carbon emissions by 15% during the month of May. People can sign up for the challenge, and will receive regular email tips on different actions to take that will reduce their person carbon footprint. If you click the link, be patient - the website will say it has to redirect you to their home page, but if you scroll down, you will see the link to the challenge. Not sure why it does this!

http://seattletimes.nwsource.com/html/climatechallenge/

They included a nice full page graphic illustrating the various things an individual can do - things ranging from replacing your old car with a more fuel-efficient model, to replacing incandescent light bulbs with compact flourescents.

They also have links to some additional information, like this story from their January 1, 2006 paper about the effects of Global Climate Change on the arctic. Again, if you click the link, you will be redirected automatically to their archives, but the story will open there.

http://seattletimes.nwsource.com/html/localnews/2002714404_arctic01main.html

I was actually in Seattle on April 15th, having flown out there (from my home in the Midwest) to attend a friend's wedding. This brings me to a bit of a tangent - albeit, a relevant tangent: carbon emissions from air travel.

Some people like to travel, or need to travel, and need or want to do so by air. It would have been impossible for me to attend the wedding if I travelled by train - I could not have taken that much time off from work. So, given the choice of attending a dear friend's first wedding (at age 44), or staying home because of guilt over carbon emissions, I chose to attend the wedding.

So, what's the carbon-conscious traveller to do?

First off, try to fly direct. The shortest distance between two points is still a straight line, and the fewer miles you fly, the less carbon you will emit.

Next, you can buy carbon offsets. A helpful article in National Geographic provides information on several options ranging from helping to support carbon-free energy production to planting trees. The same idea can be applied to automobile travel as well!

I tried to link to the National Geographic article, but for some reason the link kept giving me an error when I tried to open it from this webpage. The following links do all work though!

Purchase wind certificates. Organizations such as WindCurrent (www.windcurrent.com), NativeEnergy (www.nativeenergy.com), and Renewable Choice Energy (www.renewablechoice) allow customers to purchase certificates, sometimes known as green tags to offset emissions caused by automobile or air travel. Some of these sites have CO2 calculators that estimate your impact in tons.

Plant trees. Forests take CO2 out of the atmosphere and lock it away in wood, where it stays until the wood rots or burns. Maryland-based Trees for the Future (www.treesftf.org) offers a "Cool Car Certificate" that plants 300 trees (the estimated amount of trees it will take to offset one vehicle's emissions in a lifetime) for $30.

You can offset air travel through its "Trees for Travel" program ($1 will offset a round-trip domestic flight, $3 an international one).

The United Kingdom-based Future Forests (www.futureforests.com) plants trees in more than 80 forests in the U.K., Mexico, India, and the U.S. A global flight calculator determines how many trees you need to plant to offset a flight—two trees, for example, for a New York-to-London round trip, or $30—as a part of the CarbonNeutral flight program.

So, take the challenge, and offset your carbon!!