I’m thinking that using a wood and canvas boat over the years instead of fiberglass, abs or poly earns you enough carbon offsets to cover your plan!
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I can’t claim that offset because it is definitely not the only canoe I use.
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Buffalo Alice the graphic looks like it is actually doing what it is named, reducing inflation. I had not made the connection though I knew inflation was going down.
We can consider being composted in some jurisdictions. I might come back smelling like a rose!
WOW.
I can’t believe how much this thread expanded. I tried turning off all e-mail notifications of new msgs because they were coming in so frequently. Doesn’t seem to have worked.
Anyway, I am glad that so many paddlers here are thinking about and discussing—civilly—climate change.
Regarding disposal of our dead bodies, I like the sky burial idea, gross as some might consider it. But where the practice is legal, the vultures have been failing to appear. After much study, scientists found that the painkillers that Indian cow keepers had been treating grass with (to be kind to their old beasts of burden) was killing the vultures!
Everything affects something else, and not just in the intended way
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Ah, OK. The wealthiest person I know is very liberal yet always is trying to pay their employees as little as possible. People are weird bundles of contradiction.
I, too, have taken steps, but to be honest I’m likely to have done most of those things anyway, simply because it’s been clear to me for a long time, regardless of climate change, that people take and use more than necessary, and it makes me feel personally better to try to live lightly on the earth. I think I waste pretty much 0% of the food that I buy. I compost. I make as little garbage as possible, I use as little water as necessary. I like to plant trees and flowers that the bees like. I drive as little as possible, but then again I’m lucky in that I’m able to work remotely. I try to buy everything I can used, but then again I’m cheap and like to save money. So, am I morally good, or do these things just make ME feel good? I kind of think it’s more the latter, if I’m being honest. Though perhaps the fact that I prefer to live this way has some little thing to do with goodness, if I’m flattering myself. 
Too many moving parts for me to say there’s a direct relationship, but at least the IRA doesn’t appear to be causing inflation.
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If I can, I will go by composting. There is one company doing that that I know of.
LOL! Someone’s making a business out of it. Can’t my loved ones just chop me up and stick me in the compost bin?
Thats why we pay our elected official. Let them find a solution. Al Gore has taken the lead. Give them time - trust them to find a solution.
We have a guy well a guy and his wife in our neighborhood that lots of people complain about. He likely has the smallest carbon footprint of any of us though. He doesn’t work and lives off of a small assistance check. He owns his house/shack that was handed down to him from his mother. The entire front yard including the sidewalk and right away between sidewalk and street is 80% filled with piles of firewood I’m guessing 15-20 cord. The rest is a combination of junk riding mowers and stuff he gets for free to repurpose into something else. He has a fire ring with chairs around it and a spit with meat cooking most days and a wood fired smoker going off to the side. It is pretty regular to see a whitetail gutted out and hanging from the shade tree near the road or a bunch of small game or game birds being skinned or plucked. He grows a good size garden that is pretty plentiful but a weedy eyesore as well and a huge compost pile composting away beside it. Some call it a garbage pile. His house is falling down but he has found used 6” foam roof insulation that he has covered some of the old windows with and some of the house exterior. All winter we smell wood burning and all summer. The people who live on both sides of him have beautiful homes heated by gas and great looking yards and flowers and one has a neat little vegetable garden. They both cut their grass weekly and have chem-lawn come and spray it all the time. The guy that’s living green doesn’t drive much as he doesn’t work and it is not uncommon to see him driving a stripped down riding mower pulling a wagon to go shopping. Burning wood I’m told is kind of carbon neutral and the wood he burns he gets for free cleaning out fallen trees around where we live.
As to the inflation graph coming from 1% up to 8% and then returning to 4 is IMO not reducing. Inflation is cumulative and returning to zero is of course good but my savings is degraded by the sum of all the annual rates. To repair that it would have to go negative and we are never going to see that. Reducing it by selling off the strategic oil reserves and other such things is not real economic growth. Our gas prices here just yesterday hit $4.00. My food bill is way up. I just had a plumber quote me $300 an hour to replace a water tank in the house. I broke out my tools once again. Electric is up as well as is our water bill. Home interest rates are climbing and home prices are going thru the roof here and it isn’t logical as no one can afford to buy. When I retired I had a little nest egg saved that if things were constant. With inflation eating into the real worth of money I figure my nest egg is down about 25% without dipping into it.
Cremation I’m told by a friend who did that work for a time depends a lot on the persons weight and body fat as to the amount of natural gas needed in the process. He told me some rotund people he would have to shut off the gas totally and the process would still start overrunning the max safe heat zone and then the air would have to be throttled back. others he said that were thin required a good deal of natural gas. I’m surprised some green company hasn’t come out with an all electric unit as they will surely be required soon. Composting would be best still a lot of carbon released. Soylent Green great book and movie and the author was just off a couple years is all.
Of course that question was tongue in cheek, but then I started to think how many trees would it take to offset my carbon footprint? Guess what, the internet can answer that too; i-Tree
Saw it as a kid. Presented a faux futuristic event. Gulped when I saw the year it portrayed. Though of Dick Travy’s watch, Buck Rogers space ship settling down vertically. In the name of green, “somebody” brokered a deal to sell battery minerals to a non-US country; the same broker worked to give tarp money to a non-US country to build windmills; same person brokered a deal for foreign oil, while arranging to sell our oil reserves to another country;. Now everybody I know is burning wood to stay warm (isvthat what’s called a paradox); somebody else brokered a deal for another country to buy 20% of our uranium ore; we pay our farmers not to grow grain, then I find out that Russia and the Ukraine BECAME the breadbasket of the world (formerly a title held by the US). Seems thst they launch fuel guzzling rockets every day. Farmers in the netherlands are having their farms shut down because of cow flatulence. We’re going all electric, and dumping our oil on somebody else, burning wood to stay warm, shutting down meat production in favor of bugs. They can’t meet electricity needs of today and when 2030s hit, that will be a single point failure that a sunspot can wipe out. Maybe all our dreams will come true and the population will see a radical decline to save the planet. That may be underway - they just uncovered a foreigh lab on US soil experimenting with lab animals that aren’t affected by The Covids, TB, hepatitis . . . , but can carry it. I bet our tax money is funding that one, and cases of Leprosy are on the rise in Florida. Ha! The problem is sorting itself out, and we thought we’d have to go back to candles instead of incadecent lights. They didn’t have enough electronic chips for internal combustion engine cars, so the solution is . . . Electric cars because . . . They don’t need as many chips? This is a very enlightening thread.
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Bill Gates has said he justifies his large carbon footprint because of the work he is doing in support of climate change. Following that logic I seldom go on vacation and when I do they are close to home. I’m now retired so don’t drive to work and haven’t been on an airplane after 9/11. So by giving up an annual trip to Disney I’m offset.
Greta Thunberg came to the USA to speak and crossed the Atlantic on a new solar powered boat to maintain her green footprint once here her crew flew back to Europe and it wasn’t clear how she got back but the boat came back empty with a different crew.
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Maybe everybody can give up traveling by motor vehicle to go kayaking. Give up air conditioning. Eat bugs instead of steak or chicken.
Food bill, cost of services, nest egg … all true.
But my point was, as the graph illustrates, that the IRA did not cause the inflationary period that came along with post-pandemic economic expansion.
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I file Bill Gates under; hypocrite, e.g. “the elite, high-powered, big name advocates who jet around the world and enjoy their luxury yachts and homes while lecturing others about their carbon footprints.” If he really believed in the threat from CO2 he wouldn’t produce it by the ton and try to offset it, he’d take his billions and build a way to sequester others’ emissions, e.g pipeline, underground storage or something, something.
I really just posted the tree thing because I thought it was interesting. I don’t have enough yard to plant enough trees to soak up my carbon emissions. Although, I do think there are enough trees to soak up my emissions from my bike ride.
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Ok in this thread and the other thread I keep hearing the 2% per year number that is a must to save us all. Assuming that is correct and I can’t do anything about what anyone else will do, what do I have to do to reduce my carbon by 2% per year?
Well it seems obvious when it comes to transportation I drive 2% less. So if I drive 10,000 miles a year cutting back to 9,800 is the task at hand. If I have a car that gets 30MPG if I find one that gets 31MPG that would also work. I could look at my electric bill assuming my electric is made from fossil fuels here and reduce my KWH by 2%. I probably did that when I replaced all my lamps with LEDs. I could do the same thing with natural gas reducing my thermostat 1 degree.
This is all low hanging fruit getting started but 2% per year starts to add up going forward. In 10 years I’m going to have to drive 20% less and my house is going to be pretty cold come February.
Seeing as how I have done all these things already and some of them going back in some cases 40 years. I guess I can extend mowing my lawn to half my regular requirement or just stop mowing all together like my neighbor down the street.
2% is a great number and seems simple but what does it really mean? If we all do better how do we know if we are doing enough?
Greta says “Shame on you.” to the world. It is fine to feel shame but I want to know at what point I shouldn’t be ashamed?
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As long as we’re reviewing old stuff that implies some sort of prediction…
Sherman, set the way-back machine for 1989… hop in the holodeck… check out what an editor of Scientific American thought was a good presentation way back then. What did he get right? What did he get wrong? What could be done about it? What are we willing to do about it? What might work?
That is if we can afford the time to watch. With the internet it takes less time without the commercials, right? So much faster than going to the Britannica and having to make our own guesses based on what we find there.