 |
| Image obtained from treehugger.com |
Sometimes I get the feeling that I’m operating in a closed
system. Like there’s an upper bound on the amount of mental or physical
resources I can devote toward the seemingly limitless goals and aspirations
that flood my everyday life. It’s like you can grasp your own glass ceiling and
you want to shatter it to bits, but you’re worried that your world will shatter with
it. Or worse, you’re ready to shatter your world and aggrandize, but you’re not
sure how.
This is what the music
binge is for. You listen to a song you like on Pandora, type the name in YouTube,
paste the link in Zamzar, and then voila you have a sonic boom of expression
waiting in your email inbox. Do it twenty times over, and you’ve got the match,
the spark, the chitty and bang, bang of a verifiable personal renaissance.
I love the music binge. It shakes up my present and gives
old hopes a new spin. The current hope is a quest for perfect information, but
it starts small with my everyday choices. I want to be able to understand what
it means to dry clothes on a
clothesline instead of a dryer, to take the bus instead of driving, to compost
instead of throwing away biodegradables, etc. Screw the
abstract numbers, I need tangible figures that an everyday Steve can grasp.
Okay. Carbon dioxide emissions are a good start. I did a
little research to figure out how much carbon dioxide I can responsibly emit
each year to be able coexist in our natural heritage.
I reasoned that by taking the total amount of environmentally
acceptable carbon emissions and dividing them by the global population it would
yield the acceptable amount of carbon emissions per person. I found out that last
year every human being should’ve emitted around 6,424 lbs. of carbon. (People
actually emitted around 15,418 lbs. on average.) To
see the math, click here.
In honor of Thanksgiving, I have a metric to be thankful
for. The world speaks in pounds of carbon dioxide and it turns out when cars
burn one gallon of gasoline it releases
about 20 lbs. My Annabel drives about 25
miles per gallon. By checking my trusty driving log I see that I’ve driven about
5,252.6 miles. To date I’ve burned about 4,202.8 pounds of carbon. To
see the math, click here.
This is good news for our planet because I drive a lot of
miles to see family, friends, and to bolster quality leisure time. I haven't crashed through the 6,424 pound average yet, so I think it would be very possible to emit carbon at
the responsible environmental levels provided in the Kyoto Protocol.
I kind of want to hug a koala or high five a polar bear, but this is only a small step. I know that I have a long way in my quest to
better understand how each of my habits plays into my overall carbon
footprint. I know that transportation is only a portion of my energy budget, however, this knowledge is taking me in a direction that I like. The closer I get toward
perfect information, the sooner I can get better, freer, and chart a course
to true life, liberty and happiness.
Carbon and population figures were given by the following
websites:
No comments:
Post a Comment