opinion: carbon calculator, week 7…. a little delayed

Week 7 in the continuing series of what is missing from Carbon Calculators.  

There is a list of the things that those calculators don’t ask, thereby eliminating them from their algorithm. These are the things that are sometimes the meat of the matter, so to speak. By altering these things, you could affect your true footprint in ways unimaginable and truly make our planet sustainable.

SHOPPING…..

the activity the United States economy is entirely built on.  

The biggest problem with magazines and films and television is that they encourage you to buy.  Literally.  When we see ads that reflect a type of life we would like to emulate, an area of our brain is fired up and our craving centers are ignited.  The only satiation is to feed that craving.

There are so many issues with unnecessary consumption.  First off, your money could be better spent in other areas.  In this country, we have created the belief that buying something is more important than having the money for what we want to buy.  As we have seen in the last few months, that has been disastrous for this country, and may be something we cannot recover from.  

Secondly, there is all the emissions created from making whatever it is you are buying.  Just the games that are made in China account for 25.7 metric tons of CO2.  That is just the games.  Think of the clothes, and the electronics, and the appliances, and the shoes, and the beddings, and the cookware, and the list can go on and on, supplying 300 million people with a handful of useless things.  

Third, there is the impact of transportation.  Who knows how much CO2 is emitted because the goods had to travel from where they were made to a distribution center in the United States.  From there they had to travel to the individual stores.  Or, if you are shopping online, to your home and however many other homes, depending on the popularity of the product.  How close do you live to the mall?  Do you want the item so badly that you will travel as far as you need to to get it? After you are done using it, there is the trip to Goodwill, if you are a charitable person.  And, if not, the trip from your dumpster to the landfill.  Where the item that was in your life for the greater part of 12 months, sits on our planet for a very, VERY long time.  In some cases, much longer than your life.

This may be the greatest damage done by your shopping habit.  Most of what we have in our homes are made with products that do not go away.  Plastic never decomposes.  You think you are doing so well because you have moved away from that plastic water bottle.  But, look around.  Look at the paneling in your car.  What about the container your moisterizer comes in.  Or the shampoo, dish soap, laundry soap, the new cd or dvd, the soles of your shoes, and I could keep going.  If it is not made of plastic, maybe its metal, which could be melted down and used again.  But not if it were a battery.  Not if you are one of the millions of people that takes their pots and pans to the dump.  What happens to your car when you are done with it? We have created such ease and effortless in our lives that we never take the next steps to figure out what happens after we are done the item.

Unless the item you buy is 100% biodegradable, that item has a life span much longer than your grandchildren.  I know this because much of what’s in my house belonged to my grandparents, and it will be around much longer after I am gone, as well.  We look at these items as things we need, when in reality we are calming down some electrical activity in our brains brought on by a campaign created by a man on Madison Avenue.

Why is it we get so upset when others try to control our lives in mundane ways, but give them carte blanche when it comes to how we spend money that we worked really hard for?

what’s a country to do?

A very worthwhile article on Wall Street, the Economy, the fallout and of course… GREEN-ness.

An excerpt:
The growth of the financial sector as the engine of the economy over the past 25 years has corresponded with a “de-industrialization” of our economy. The result: we don’t make anything anymore. Instead, we’ve become infatuated with highly speculative forms of investment that don’t produce anything except bubbles and burst bubbles.

click HERE for the whole darn thing.

greenvesting

I just really want to direct you to THIS article that summarizes, THIS article in The Nation.

prevention is the best medicine

HERE is an article with Bill Clinton and Al Gore about how we could have prevented this financial crisis if we had embraced green technology and jobs.

Just food for thought…

from GRIST and CLINTON GLOBAL INITIATIVE