Heat Waves, Smog Warnings & No Man's Lands

In the evolutionary, historical sense, human beings really aren't that different from other animals. The human species emerged as a result of optimal environmental conditions. There are lots of places on Earth that human hands had never touched up until the last few hundred years, and although they've nearly all been explored save a few, at most of these hostile locales it just doesn't make any sense for people to stay.

The interior of Alaska comes to mind. The Rub' Al-Khali might be another. Maybe that god-forsaken Black Rock City. You won't find any permanent encampments or signs of civilization there, because the climate is just too forbidding, too harsh for humanity to exist in any substantial way.

With some exceptions, you can mostly trace the spread of human civilization as it developed, and along the way you can pick out the places people broke ground with some accuracy. Follow the water. Look where the climate is most palatable. Catal Huyuk didn't spring up from the empty quarter of the Arabian Desert, it emerged from a place where an agricultural life could be easy for people. As humanity transitioned from a pastoral lifestyle to a sedentary, urban one, it assembled into organized enclaves in places that were most conducive to life.

The oral traditions of humanity are rife with stories of cataclysmic change leaving cities unlivable. Plato describes an unrecorded, prehistoric civilization that is undone by all-too-human hubris and swallowed by the ocean. Western mythology, especially the mythology of the fertile crescent, all share the common thread of a great flood that covers the whole world. And in more recent times, fanciful Romantic authors and 19th century Spiritualists described the lost continents of Mu and Lemuria sinking and leaving a diaspora of people in their wakes.

But there's no need to look to sandaled philosophers of great antiquity or tarot-reading occult-book-store crystal-wavers for the truth about what it looks like when a place becomes unlivable. The truth is, it might happen so slowly and so imperceptibly that you wouldn't notice it, and you one day wake up and realize you can't leave your house.

This summer has been the hottest on record for the Pacific Northwest. It had a late start, and I recall often opining that if it stayed as mild as it had been, it might not get very hot at all this year. Then, in late July, the thermometers broke, and Seattle's previous record temperature was shattered by a 103°F afternoon. Lucky for us, Seattle's topography contribute to a weather pattern that keeps the air quality here pretty decent. It's almost always clear enough to see Mt. Rainier from the I5 bridge in the University District. We've got it pretty good here.

Not so for Vancouver BC. Wildfires in Lillooet, record breaking heat and an urban population that owns 2.3 cars per household despite a vast mass transit system, along with geographic features surrounding the city that trap smog in to boot, all coalesced as factors in a perfect storm to send the air quality index in the Metro Vancouver area hurtling to level 6, the highest in memory for the bourgeois business-class yuppies who make their living there. Asthmatics and people suffering from respiratory diseases were recommended to stay indoors, and though it would dissipate in a matter of days, the effect of the air quality warning was troubling. How could a place with such strict emissions controls and an incomparably responsible society, bent on being green, be so thick with pollution?

But Vancouver's air pollution problem pales in comparison to Beijing's. Following the failure of Mao's Great Leap Forward, Deng Xiaoping led the Communist Party of China to adopt what it termed "Socialism with Chinese characteristics", a pastiche of both ideological Marxism and, with a certain grudging acknowledgement to pragmatism, contrarian Capitalist concepts as well. With barely a sliver of an opening to the absurd vastness of the Chinese consumer markets, virtually overnight the country became solvent, and within a decade the poverty rate had been slashed from more than half of the country's 1 billion during the Mao era to a shrinking 12% in 1981 and single-digits more recently.

The Beijing of 2009 is just under 3 times as large as it was prior to the economic reforms, and duplicate success stories raise metropolises across the country at a rapid clip. With the new-found prosperity came all the trappings of modern first-world nations: cars, skyscrapers, airports, luxury apartments, corporate identities, advertisements and, at the heart of it all, manufacturing plants making the export goods that fuels China's economic breakthrough.

Beijing has arrived, and by 2009 China has become the reigning economic power in the world, but rapid modernization brought the unintended consequence of unchecked, unchallenged release of greenhouse gases the likes of which the world has never seen. Forbes Magazine estimates that the 10 most polluted cities in the world are all in China, and the Chinese government claims nearly one and a half million premature deaths occur as a result of poor air quality every year. Where Vancouver's air quality might be dangerous for people already at risk, Beijing is consistently shrouded in a dark grey porridge that chokes healthy people to death and reduces visibility to less than the length of a city block.

The point I'm trying to make here, is that humanity is turning the places it makes it's bed unlivable. The non-stop, uninterrupted release of not just the greenhouse gases that feed into self-perpetuating feedback loops and precipitate global climate change, but also the real nasty stuff that comes out of your exhaust pipe and your chimney and every coal power plant you use when you charge up your iPhone, is slowly but surely making those archetypal myths of cataclysmic change seem prophetic at best and at worst like observations that self-similarity in man's inhumanity to man scales up and will eventually kill us. There's no sense in this. We're committing suicide on a global scale, and we're doing it in a really weak, wimpy, cowardly way that betrays our imprinted consumerist apathy.

That's why offsetting your personal carbon footprint is so important. If everyone in Seattle, Vancouver and Beijing paid for their yearly carbon output, we would solve the global ecology crisis in less time than it took for China to awaken from it's ideologically-lullabied slumber. All it takes is pointing your browser at http://www.offsetcarbonfootprint.org/. All the links are there, they'll help you calculate your carbon footprint and give you all the tools you need to decide how you'd like to offset your carbon. They make it easy! They'll accept all major payment methods and will even offer you a certified guarantee. All you've got to do is make the choice to take responsibility for your share of climate change.

Are you ready to do the right thing? Time is of the essence, so don't delay. Do it today.

What Are Greenhouse Gases?

Carbon is the fourth most prevalent element in the solar system. It's the bedrock of all known organic life. Carbon dioxide is recycled into oxygen by all plants and animals. It's in a sort of dynamo between animals and plants exchanging CO2 for oxygen, filtering out the natural clear background noise of the environment and providing a relatively nice planet to live on. It evolved this way. This is why life is possible on Earth.

The planet has come to this fragile state by a delicate balancing act perfected over 4.6 billion years. It arose out of nature, like a flower from concrete. One could spend a lifetime covering what the philosophers say about that! But science shows that Earth is fundamentally unguarded and vulnerable to changes that may be imperceptible to us.

By the late 18th century, the Enlightenment had brought not only revolutions of the mind and state, but also technological revolutions, and the mechanical amusements of the ultrarich landed aristocrats became affordable to a new class of merchant, who presided over factories and smokestacks to become captains of industry and railroad barons. Tall, brick exhaust towers emerged on the horizon, and a malaise of thick haze spread over the land.

Fast forward 150 years. In the 1950's, America returns from World War II flush with triumph and economic prosperity, and so began another technological revolution, where a new class of postwar successes slid smoothly into the prefab suburbs, all in gleaming chrome Cadillacs, streaming down the 16 lane highways full of cars, smiling in averaged-off numbers like 3.6, Mom & Dad & Buddy & Sis and even the family dog. Now, that same dream of owning some kind of great guzzling machine became not only feasible for the factory owner -- now it was affordable to the workers, too. The ubiquity of cars duplicated the effect of the paper mills and smokestacks of the industrial age, and the murky soup hanging over cities started getting thicker.

What people don't realize when they witness air pollution firsthand, is that it accumulates. The carbon that humanity is releasing right now is adding to a mass that contains the same carbon that was released when the first factory switched on. Greenhouse gases don't just go away. They accumulate.

Environmentalism and the broader tradition of conservationism have always existed in some form or another, but the modern Green movement is an unprecedented break with that most august and austere tradition. The effects of unchallenged emission of greenhouse gases are self-evident, and so even the factory owner has to stroke his chin and wonder aloud if the businesses of ruining the Earth and poisoning the seas are going to effect his bottom line. The U.S. military increasingly relies on solar power as it's primary source of electricity, since operational security demands an uninterrupted source of power. They're betting on the long-term viability of oil, or rather a lack thereof.

This is why buying offsets is so important. Whether you're a commuter paying off the 4 tons of carbon you produce per year, or a CEO of a Fortune 500 infrastructure company with an international fleet of cargo jets and supertankers, you can cancel out your carbon production by purchasing offsets and contributing to the global effort to change the world. It doesn't cost much, and it's for everybody! It's easy, and OffsetCarbonFootprint.org does everything for you and makes it easier than anyone else. Do the right thing for the environment. Now's a great time.

There are Vampires in my House

It’s officially called Wasted Standby Power. But most people refer to it as the electricity vampire that sucks energy out of appliances, even when they aren’t in use. Vampires in the home are one of the many things that add to a household’s carbon footprint.

Home phones, microwaves, alarm clocks, computers, remote control units, rechargers and any other appliance that is left plugged into the mains can steal energy from the grid and money from your pocket. In fact, over 4 billion dollars a year goes to feed these electrical vampires. It’s bad for the planet, really bad for the planet. Carbon emissions are released in the process of making electricity. So every kilowatt of energy wasted leads to the pointless release of carbon into our atmosphere, adding to the problem of global warming.

Those poor, poor polar bears, floating on ice cubes because we were too lazy to unplug the cell phone charger from the wall.

It can be up to 10 percent of the utility bill, accounts for billions in wasted money, tons of life destroying carbon emissions and aids in the pollution of the planet and the heat in the sky. We offset our carbon footprint by practicing balance. If we reduce our use of power by plugging things into power strips that have an off switch, unplugging all appliances at the end of the day, turning out lights and removing anything from the electrical socket that serves no purpose, we can begin to win the war against these power sucking fiends.

And for everyone that’s begins complaining about the effort it takes to switch off and unplug? Fine, don’t do it. You are free not to. But consider doing something to offset your growing carbon footprint. Calculate your carbon tones using the carbon footprint calculator and if, after you realize just how much money and energy you are wasting, you still don’t want to join the crusade against the vampires? It’s your choice but offsetting your energy usage by helping a few trees has got to make you feel better.

For me, I’ll keep waging the battle using my vampire deterrent: unplugging appliances.

Cheaper than a bulb of garlic.

Get Ready For The 21st Century, It's Gonna Be A Scorcher

Stunning satellite photographs published this week provide the most visually arresting evidence of worldwide climate change yet.

The photographs, taken over the past decade, were kept classified under the aegis of "national security" during the Bush years, deemed too sensitive -- perhaps too damning? -- for public consumption. This month, the National Academy of Sciences recommended that the Obama administration declassify the photos, and they were released in a torrent of around 1,000 of the photographs the following day.

The photos show a stark array of before-and-after comparisons. The single most startling image (shown above) is a shot of Barrow, Alaska, the northernmost point in the United States, historically surrounded year-round by a sheet of solid ice which, during the summer of 2007, receded and finally vanished completely, leaving a coast cloistered by solid ice since time immemorial confronted quite suddenly by the facts of climate change. Other photos in the series show the gradual disappearance of the Bering Glacier and open water on the Beaufort Sea, another location historically covered in an ice-sheet.

With facts like these developing on the ground, it's hard to feel as though your personal effort to conserve energy and shrink your footprint is worthwhile. Climate science suggests that the rapidly accelerating effects of global warming are not only far removed along causal chains from carbon emissions, but are likely precipitated by slippery-slope feedback loops, a global climate in tumbling transit from the balancing-act status-quo of the Holocene interglacial towards a hotter and wetter planetary configuration that represents a great big question mark for life on Earth. In other words, the struggle to save the Earth might be too little, too late, but nothing is ever so certain. Only time will tell, and meanwhile it couldn't hurt to ride your bike to work for a change, eat a vegetarian meal for a week or buy carbon offsets.

(Source: http://gfl.usgs.gov/ArcticSeaIce.shtml)

India Environment Ministry Says Climate Change Is Western Baloney

The chasm between the Indian environmental ministry and the self-evident truths of climate change widened precipitously today when Jairem Ramesh downplayed the danger of climate change and characterised fears of the Himalayan glaciers melting over the next 40 years as "... preconceived notion[s] ... based on the western media".

Speaking at an environmental threats conference in Delhi, Mr Ramesh dismissed predictions that the glaciers might disappear within 40 years as a result of global warming. "We have to get out of the preconceived notion, which is based on western media, and invest our scientific research and other capacities to study Himalayan atmosphere," he said. "Science has its limitation. You cannot substitute the knowledge that has been gained by the people living in cold deserts through everyday experience."

The comments by a close ally of Sonia Gandhi, the ruling Congress party president, are likely to discourage environmental campaigners hoping that India might help forge an agreement at United Nations climate talks in Copenhagen in December.

Earlier this week, Mr Ramesh challenged Mrs Clinton over her appeal to India to embrace a lowcarbon future and not repeat the mistakes of the developed world in seeking fast industrialisation. He said India was not prepared to agree to legally binding greenhouse gas emission caps, although developed countries are not asking for such caps.

Ramesh's flippant dismissal of the matter is in stark contrast to the facts. The scientific consensus has repeatedly reaffirmed the fact that climate change can be directly attributed to the breakneck speed with which the first world industrialised in the 19th and 20th centuries. Still, the climate change denial meme survives, in large part due to the insidious, interdependent relationship of the sleazy, amoral career-politician suits in control of the state and industrial business interests whose revenue-model relies on exercising free license to poison you and spurn catastrophic climate change, all the while manufacturing reams of disposable consumer junk.

The comments seemed to drive further nails into the coffin of the notion that the Indian state might join the emerging bloc of nations committed (in theory) to sustainable industrial practices. Ramesh's faux-skepticism comes on the heels of India's refusal to agree to binding carbon caps and long-term reduction goals at the G8 summit and later at a press conference during American Secretary of State Hillary Clinton's first visit to India in her capacity as chief diplomat for the Obama administration. Between today's statement and the habitual aloofness of India with regard to environmental concerns, the future of the Indian subcontinent looks hazy, stinky and possibly underwater.

(Source: http://www.ft.com/cms/s/0/43702396-77ea-11de-9713-00144feabdc0.html)

OCF Now Paired With Chicago Climate Exchange

We are proud to announce that OffsetCarbonFootprint.Org has teamed up with Chicago Climate Exchange (CCX). CCX operates North America’s only cap and trade system for all six greenhouse gases, with global affiliates and projects worldwide. CCX Members are leaders in greenhouse gas (GHG) management and represent all sectors of the global economy, as well as public sector innovators. Reductions achieved through CCX are the only reductions made in North America through a legally binding compliance regime, providing independent, third party verification by the Financial Industry Regulatory Authority (FINRA, formerly NASD).

The commodity traded on CCX is the CFI contract, each of which represents 100 metric tons of CO2 equivalent. CFI contracts are comprised of Exchange Allowances and Exchange Offsets. Exchange Allowances are issued to emitting Members in accordance with their emission baseline and the CCX Emission Reduction Schedule. Exchange Offsets are generated by qualifying offset projects. Make sure to visit the our website for CCX products as well as 5 other ways to offset your carbon footprint!