Great Turning: A Climate positive conference

Fifty conference-goers joined us for the Climate Positive Challenge!

You may have heard a lot in the news of late about CO2 in the atmosphere, climate changes and global warming. You may have also heard of carbon offsets, and the controversy surrounding them.  Scientific studies indicate clearly that our climate is changing and human activity is a significant cause.  If we do nothing to change this, we endanger our planet’s health and our own future.

At this conference, we hoped to ground these complex and at times overwhelming ideas in actual data and actions that can make a difference in your own personal and professional life.  We gathered some data from conference participants to help us all become educated about our collective impact, and offered some ideas for collective solutions to offset that impact.

When folks arrived for the conference, the conference packet included a simple worksheet to help calculate the carbon impact of travel to join us for this conference.  It also had a checklist of voluntary actions folks could take to offset that impact, as well as information about the whole issue of carbon impact and resources to learn more. This awesome worksheet was developed by Daniel Greenberg of Living Routes -- thanks Daniel! See his website at to learn more about Living Routes and their work with carbon offsets. http://livingroutes.org/about/walk.htm

Data we needed for the challenge:

1) How were people getting to the conference?
2) How far were they traveling? We asked them to record mileage by car and airplane as closely as possible.

The actual worksheet we asked folks to fill out is available as a PDF: Carbon Challenge Worksheet.

The results:

• The fifty conference goers who gave us data generated 610 lbs. of CO2 emissions on average, for a total of 26,668 lbs of emissions.
• The estimated total emissions of all attendees (even those who didn't give us data) is about 89,665 lbs of CO2.
• The average offset amount pledged by respondents is 2,226 (note this it almost double what their emissions were).
• The total offsets pledged (by only the fifty respondents) are 89,024 lbs.
• This means a shortfall of only 641 lbs of CO2, even if the other 80 or so conference goers do not offset their emissions at all! We think this is great, and are pleased folks were so motivated to offset beyond their emissions.

Stay tuned to this site to see how Audubon Expedition Insisted will offset the shortfall, and other late-breaking data.

General Steps to Reduce Your Carbon Impact:
1) Measure your carbon impact.  There are many impact calculators out there, just pick one and assess your impact.  You can measure things like transportation, food production and transport, electricity use, paper and household product production and transport, etc.
2) Reduce your carbon impact as much as possible – this is the step many folks forget!  Buy local organic food and grow your own; reduce, reuse and recycle; minimize your driving and travel;  and use energy efficient appliances and products.
3) Offset the balance of your carbon emissions.  You can purchase carbon offsets from a variety of companies and non-profits, and can take other actions to offset your carbon impact as well.

Some places to go for more information:

Environmental Defense has a good website with a personal carbon impact calculator at their website.

http://www.thegreenguide.com/doc/119/calculator

http://www.epa.gov/climatechange/emissions/ind_calculator.html

For a guide to various retail offset providers, go to Clean Air, Cool Planet's report. 

You can also see Nobel Prize co-winner Al Gore in the movie An Inconvenient Truth, available via this website.