Carbon neutral

From Rod Beckstrom - The Starfish and The Spider

For a company, an individual or family to be carbon neutral means that they have done two things:

1) calculated their carbon footprint 2) offset 100% of that footprint by purchasing carbon offsets or through other conservation measures.

The net result is that the company or individuals are then not contributing any greenhouse gases to the environment.

To accomplish this, our family does the following:

1) buys only wind powered electricity at our Palo Alto home 2) put 28 solar photo voltaic panels on our Santa Cruz beach house 3) did a solar passive heating design on our beach house 4) installed compact fluorescent light bulbs in both houses (you can even get ones that have warm incandescent light now) 5) we traded in my big German sedan for a Toyota Prius hybrid 6) we try to conserve energy but don't always do a good job 7) we calculated our remaining carbon footprint for our entire life as a family, plus added in my life years before getting married and calculated that we needed to offset about 2,000 tons of carbon 8) we bought carbon offset tonnage from www.carbonfund.org

Rod was interviewed by CNBC in November 2006 about what it means to be carbon neutral. Unfortunately, they have the copyrights to that interview, so it is not posted on the web, to my knowledge.

Rod serves on the Board of Trustees of Environmental Defense (Fund), the group which originally helped to draft and develop the Kyoto Protocol.

Rod hopes you too will calculate your carbon footprint and then offset it, or at least make a 20 to 30% reduction so you can be personally Kyoto compliant, whether your country is or not. In the new starfish world, we can each take action to do the right thing.