Yep, this is it, one last (lengthy) Carbon Neutral Journal post for the record–a decision I should have made a year ago. Instead, I eked out a measly total of 10 posts in 2008, after having written 378 posts in my first year of carbon neutral blogging.

As some of you know, the meager output this past year wasn't because I lost interest or commitment to the topic. Quite the contrary–I simply redirected my time and energy from daily opining to trying to do something about the climate crisis. And I'm pleased to say that the Teton Area 10×10 effort and my new biz, Eco-Logistics, are both making steady progress toward that end.

Teton Area 10×10, our community initiative to reduce energy use by 10% by 12/31/2010, now has 180 people committed to the effort, and the Web site is growing, featuring 28 residential and two business profiles of recent energy use.

On the green event front, after a year of working on a couple of big projects for my former employer and Heatsheets manufacturer AFMInc, my partner, Lee Barrett, and I have our sights set on helping individual events clean up their act and reduce their carbon footprint in 2009. Already signed on are the Austin Marathon and the Lilac Bloomsday Run. With conversations lined up in the coming weeks with a number of other mass participant sporting events, I'm confident that Eco-Logistics will make a positive contribution to event participants' race experiences and the environment in the coming year. Who knows, we may even convince LOTOJA or some ultra-distance running relay to offer participants a way to help offset the huge carbon footprints that are inherent in point-to-point long distance races?

If you're interested in keeping track of what Lee and I are up to, please subscribe to the RSS feed at Eco-Logistics.biz.

For now, let's take one last look at what I've attempted to accomplish over the past two years:

After reducing our home energy use (electricity and natural gas) by 11% from 2006-20007, we slipped a little this year, increasing our home energy use by 3.3% from 2007-2008. My best guess is that some of that is due to the incredibly long winter we experienced (it snowed into June) and the addition of electric radiant heat in our master bathroom (a room we typically didn't heat in the past). The goal for 2009 is to get back to 2007 levels of use and maintain, or improve upon, a 10% reduction in home energy use, in keeping with our commitment to the Teton Area 10×10 initiative.

On the transportation front, we continued to reduce our driving–down to 12,500 miles this year, 20% less than in 2007–and made a switch in vehicles mid-year. No we didn't buy a Prius, but we did realize a significant savings in fuel consumption, simply by switching from our Audi with bikes on top to a mini-van with bikes inside–worth about 20% better mileage on long road trips with the bikes.

One of the reasons for the significant reduction in driving, however, was a corresponding increase in airline travel. In fact, after having not flown at all for over three years, my new biz venture had me flying a fair amount–ironic isn't it, that my venture into environmental consulting would greatly increase my own carbon footprint. According to the flight-by-flight carbon calculator on TerraPass, our flying footprint in 2008 was a whopping 16.5 tons (up from 3828 pounds of co2 in 2007)!

Speaking of TerraPass, one of the most confusing choices I've faced in the past two years is which carbon calculator to use? I started with Al Gore's calculator, but quickly moved on to TerraPass. I've also played with NativeEnergy's calculator, and the one at ZeroJH (supplied by Bonneville Environmental Foundation).

Much as I wanted to support ZeroJH and the Solar4Schools program, I found the ZeroJH tool to be the most approximate in its calculations. Al Gore's calculator said our 2008 co2 footprint was 16.7 tons (down from the original calculation of 17.5 tons in 2006), and referred me to NativeEnergy to purchase offsets totaling $233.80. TerraPass calculated our footprint at 17.5 tons, and the bill came to $208.25.

In the end, I went with the TerraPass calculator for a couple of reasons: it allows you to calculate the co2 impact of flying on a flight-by-flight basis, and it allows you to enter specific mileage data for any number of cars, by year, make and model–none of the other calculators provide this level of detail.

One note: in addition to the $208.25 paid to TerraPass to offset our carbon footprint, we choose to pay Lower Valley Energy $17.50/month to fully offset our electrical use with an investment in GreenPower.

bottom line:

$418.25, 20% less driving and a continued focus on managing home energy use got Alisan and me to carbon neutral for 2008.

We'll continue to work to reduce our carbon footprint in 2009 as we watch our country turn a page in the history book and, hopefully, pay more attention to the pressing state of the climate crisis than we have in the past.

Best wishes for a healthy and happy new year!

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I'm pleased to say that the hard work of a lot of folks is beginning pay off!

Last Saturday over 110 Eco-Fair attendees signed up at the Teton Area 10×10 Booth to reduce their resource use 10% by the year 2010.  These area households and businesses took a 10×10 Pledge and walked away with “Efficiency Bags” with tools such as CFLs and Smart Power Strips to begin the journey of resource reduction. Over the next month and a half participants in the program will have access to an online resource with tips, tricks, tools, and techniques to reduce at home and on the job.  By mid-July the Teton Area 10×10 Web site will allow participants to begin tracking and quantifying their home or business’s resource use.
 
The Teton Area 10×10 initiative, a program of the Teton Climate Collaborative, is an effort aimed at supporting efforts resulting in increasingly efficient resource use in the Tetons region every year.  The Teton Area 10×10 is sponsored and led by two Jackson, Wyoming-based non-profits the Charture Institute and Pursue Balance.  A Steering Committee of interested volunteers advises the Initiative and the Initiative’s projects are done in collaboration with other local citizens, businesses, non-profits, and the local governmental organizations.

For more information on the Teton Area 10×10 and how you can get involved visit www.tetonarea10×10.org . 

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OK folks, it's time for me to admit that I've totally lost the plot here at the Carbon Neutral Journal. With a total of just eight posts for the year, how can I even call myself a blogger?

After a year of daily posts, driven by a weekly schedule of topics, I thought I could just dial things back a bit, yet continue to blog about all things Carbon Neutral in a relevant and somewhat timely fashion.

Instead, I find myself up to my eyeballs in two new carbon neutral related ventures. I hope you'll find them of interest, and will allow me the time and space to fully develop these new ventures at the expense of this journal. That's not to say that I'm completely giving up on the Carbon Neutral Journal, just redistributing the workload a bit to do justice to a couple of new and exciting projects.

The first is a partnership with a longtime friend and colleague, Lee Barrett. It's called Eco-Logistics.biz, and is an outgrowth of an opportunity I first wrote about in the Journal back in August in a post titled greening Las  Vegas. As I said:

two old friends from the running world produce an annual conference for race directors–they've asked me to help them come up with an agenda for a one-day conference on "greening" running races.

That conference, titled How Green is Your Event? is scheduled for April 5th in Arlington, Virginia.

Since that first post linking participant sporting events with environmental responsibility, I've written a number of related posts. From at least we carpooled to prioritizing play to carbon free surfing to sports and the environment, I've considered the impacts of a variety of sporting events on the environment and the rise in greenhouse gases.

My conclusion: the status quo for today's participant sporting events is shockingly wasteful. Duh!

So Lee and I are going to try and do something about that by offering our expertise (mine in sports marketing, event management and public relations, and Lee's in event management and solid waste management) to event directors who want to make a difference. Stay tuned to our progress by subscribing to the RSS feed at Eco-Logistics.biz.

The second effort that's been taking a lot of my time is called the Teton Area 10 x 10 project. It's inspired by the Town of Jackson's and Teton County's 10 x 10 effort, which I've written about on numerous occasions. The goal of the Teton Area 10 x 10 effort is have participating households and businesses commit to reduce their energy use by at least 10 % by 2010. We've got a Web site in the works and plans to roll out this initiative later in the spring. Until the Teton Area 10 x 10 Web site is up and running, I'll be posting updates here in the journal.

So, you see, I haven't just been slacking off the past few months. I'm just as excited about both of these new ventures  as I was when I committed to blogging about carbon neutrality every day in 2007.

Good things are in the works. I hope you'll stay tuned.

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An article in today's New York Times, titled In Many Communities, It's Not Easy Going Green, reminded me that I meant to blog about the first-ever all-employee meeting the Town of Jackson and Teton County held on Tuesday. (Once I fell out of the daily habit of blogging, I seem to need reminders like this to do what came naturally and automatically every day last year.)

Anyway, the occasion for the all-employee meeting was twofold: celebration and education. Teton County and the Town of Jackson now have an approved Energy Efficiency Action Plan (aka 10 x 10), and it was time to rally the troops. The event itself was well organized, took advantage of the Theater at the Center For The Arts as a perfect space for both an educational session and an after-party, and featured presentations by employee leaders of the various action teams.

The message was clear: our local governments have committed to reduce energy and fuel use by 10% by the end of 2010 (compared to 2006 baseline data). Why? Because it is prudent fiscal policy. Period.

I can't/won't argue with the point of view that the 10 x 10 initiative will save taxpayers' money. And I fully realize that the only way Town Council and the Board of County Commissioners could muster unanimous approval for 10 x 10 was to avoid any shade of green. But I do think it's disingenuous to advance such a politically correct rationale.

After all, for many folks in this community, money is no object. In a valley full of 8-10,000 square foot homes with heated driveways, it's going to take more than an economic argument to get the citizenry to follow our governments' lead.

I feel strongly that every household and business in Teton County should embrace the spirit of 10 x10 and set out on a measurable path of energy reduction. Why? Because we're energy pigs! Period.

Sorry folks. There's no way I can beat around the bush on that simple fact.

Had today's NYT article mentioned Jackson Hole in its summary of community efforts, it would have had another obstacle to going green to talk about — the one where folks are afraid to admit that's what they are really trying to do.

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A year ago, I wrote a post titled State of Denial, which took advantage of a nifty New York Times feature that allowed one to search the State Of The Union speech to see what terms or phrases were used by our feckless leader. In today's recap of last night's speech, the NYT ran a sidebar called The Words That Were Used, but there was no search capability to enable further analysis.

Left to my own devices, I quickly turned to Gristmill and Reuters for perspective on what Bush had said about climate change and related efforts to stem the warming.

As you would expect, David Roberts is on top of things at Gristmill with a post titled Robust SOTU Debunkery.

Reuters, on the other hand, saw the glass as half full, covering Bush's commitment to promoting clean energy technologies and fight climate change through a $2 billion investment over the next three years to a new international fund.

Let us create a new international clean technology fund, which will help developing nations like India and China make greater use of clean energy sources.

Of course, even the Reuters piece couldn't avoid the conclusion that:

Unlike last year's State of the Union message, there was little in Bush's speech this year calling for a major overhaul of U.S. energy policy.

Some would say that's because Congress just passed major energy legislation — I'd say it's because the lame duck is still convinced that "aspirational targets" are the way to go.

Too bad the NYT word finder didn't have search capability this year. I would have loved to really compare this year's speech to last year's speech.

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So said the headline in yesterday's Jackson Hole News & Guide. Here's a link to the story. Too bad the N&G didn't post the five complementary stories it ran in the print edition, but kudos nevertheless to the paper for taking a broad look at the issues we face, and some of the initiatives underway to reduce energy demands in our mountain valley.

If I can ever find my way back to the path of regular blogging, Carbon Neutral Journal readers will hear a lot more about a couple of those initiatives — particularly the effort to launch a community wide 10 x 10 effort to reduce energy use and trash generation by 10% by the year 2010.

In the meantime, read the N&G Story about us energy pigs, visit ZeroJH to calculate your localized carbon footprint and see how you rate compared to the per capita estimate of 37 metric tons of CO2 emissions per Jackson Hole resident. And, while you're visiting ZeroJH, consider the impact of what the calculator tells you, identify areas where you can conserve, then buy offsets for what you cannot conserve.

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I couldn't help but notice the story in today's New York Times titled F.T.C. Asks if Carbon-Offset Money is Well Spent.

The essential question: Where exactly is the $54 million American corporations and consumers spent on carbon offsets last year going?

Apparently the Federal Trade Commission is asking the question as it examines green marketing in the US.

It's an important question to ask.

According to Deborah Platt Majoras, chairwoman of the F.T.C.

With the rapid growth of green programs like carbon offsets, “there’s a heightened potential for deception."

Indeed, the article goes on to present the green claims of a number of brand name manufacturers. Give it a read, then let me know what you think about the threat of greenwashing.

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