{"id":64,"date":"2017-04-22T18:32:31","date_gmt":"2017-04-22T22:32:31","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.jonathanleroux.org\/wordpress\/?p=64"},"modified":"2017-04-22T18:32:31","modified_gmt":"2017-04-22T22:32:31","slug":"sort-of-offsetting-our-carbon-footprint","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.jonathanleroux.org\/wordpress\/2017\/04\/22\/sort-of-offsetting-our-carbon-footprint\/","title":{"rendered":"(Sort of) offsetting our carbon footprint"},"content":{"rendered":"<p>Hi there! It&#8217;s been a while!<\/p>\n<p>Given that today is Earth Day, I thought I&#8217;d finally take action on something that has been on my mind for quite a while: offsetting in some way (part of) our family&#8217;s carbon footprint.<\/p>\n<p>We travel quite a bit, to visit family or go on vacation, and I feel guilty every time I fly. And although we do now have solar panels that cover virtually all our electrical needs, we do rely on propane to heat our home. That&#8217;s definitely not 100% of our whole impact, but I hope that&#8217;s already some chunk of it.<\/p>\n<p>So I decided to proceed in two steps:<\/p>\n<ul>\n<li>Calculate an estimate of our carbon footprint (for 2016, I plan on doing this every year)<\/li>\n<li>Figure out <strong>how to<\/strong> offset it: it turns out this is not so simple.<\/li>\n<\/ul>\n<p>The first step is easy: there are plenty of tools out there. I picked <a href=\"http:\/\/calculator.carbonfootprint.com\/calculator.aspx\">this one<\/a>, and used the House, Flight, and Car tabs. I (of course) counted flights for the whole family, and included business trips for myself.<\/p>\n<p>It only took a few minutes to get this:<\/p>\n<ul>\n<li><strong>Flights<\/strong>:\u00a033.73 metric tons of CO2.\u00a0At roughly $13\/ton, that&#8217;s $450.<\/li>\n<li><strong>House<\/strong>:\u00a0In 2016, we bought 707.3 Gallons from our propane company (this number can be easily found on each bill). At 5.7 metric tons of CO2 per 1000 gallons, that&#8217;s about 4 metric tons, so $52.<\/li>\n<li><strong>Car<\/strong>: I proudly drive an e-golf, but we still have a gas-powered minivan to haul the family. We roughly drove 4000 miles on that car last year, which gave me 1.43 metric tons in the calculator above, so $19.<\/li>\n<\/ul>\n<p><strong>Grand total: $521<\/strong><\/p>\n<p>Now to the key part: how do you offset your carbon footprint? There are many diverging opinions on the worthiness of carbon offset initiatives, and I haven&#8217;t been able to figure out whether using carbon offset programs is really guaranteed to result in a real impact in the long run. So here is what I decided to do: I didn&#8217;t &#8220;<em>offset<\/em>&#8221; my carbon footprint per se, but instead <strong>donated\u00a0the money to environmental organizations<\/strong>. I hope that these organizations will make good use of this money to fight global warming and other environmental issues at a greater scale.<\/p>\n<p>Here is my pick:<\/p>\n<ul>\n<li><a href=\"https:\/\/www.nrdc.org\/\">NRDC<\/a>\u00a0(Natural Resources Defense Council)<\/li>\n<li><a href=\"http:\/\/www.ucsusa.org\/\">Union of Concerned Scientists<\/a><\/li>\n<li><a href=\"https:\/\/350.org\/\">350.org<\/a><\/li>\n<li><a href=\"https:\/\/www.lcv.org\/\">League of Conservation Voters<\/a><\/li>\n<li><a href=\"http:\/\/www.sierraclub.org\/\">Sierra Club<\/a><\/li>\n<\/ul>\n<p>They all have Donate buttons that are very easy to find. I shared the money evenly among them.<\/p>\n<p>Not that hard, right? I hope some of you will be inspired to do the same! If you do, or if you have any suggestions\/comments, feel free to drop me a note \ud83d\ude42<\/p>\n<p>&nbsp;<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>Hi there! It&#8217;s been a while! Given that today is Earth Day, I thought I&#8217;d finally take action on something that has been on my mind for quite a while: offsetting in some way (part of) our family&#8217;s carbon footprint. We travel quite a bit, to visit family or go on vacation, and I feel guilty every time I fly. And although we do now have solar panels that cover virtually all our electrical needs, we do rely on propane to heat our home. That&#8217;s definitely not 100% of our whole impact, but I hope that&#8217;s already some chunk of it. So I decided to proceed in two steps: Calculate &hellip; <\/p>\n<p class=\"link-more\"><a href=\"https:\/\/www.jonathanleroux.org\/wordpress\/2017\/04\/22\/sort-of-offsetting-our-carbon-footprint\/\" class=\"more-link\">Continue reading<span class=\"screen-reader-text\"> &#8220;(Sort of) offsetting our carbon footprint&#8221;<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-64","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-uncategorized"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.jonathanleroux.org\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/64"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.jonathanleroux.org\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.jonathanleroux.org\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.jonathanleroux.org\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.jonathanleroux.org\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=64"}],"version-history":[{"count":3,"href":"https:\/\/www.jonathanleroux.org\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/64\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":67,"href":"https:\/\/www.jonathanleroux.org\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/64\/revisions\/67"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.jonathanleroux.org\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=64"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.jonathanleroux.org\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=64"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.jonathanleroux.org\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=64"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}