Posted by
Aaron McLucas on Sunday, May 11, 2008 10:26:43 AM
Seems that Mr. Pitt gets a five star 'Hippy-crite' rating for his
poor judgement when it comes to the environment. What a surprise?!
The story goes on to talk about carbon counting and just how complicated it can get.
But before anyone gets too hopeful about lowering Americans’ greenhouse emissions, consider some figures from
Ron Bailey at Reason. Using the calculator at
Carbon Footprint, he found that he and his wife have a typical American footprint of about 20 tons of carbon dioxide apiece per year (with their chief sin being 15 tons from air travel). Then he envisioned a few lifestyle changes:
So in a quest to lower my impact on the environment, I calculated our carbon footprint if we cut our use of electricity and natural gas in half, switched our two cars for a single Toyota Prius and reduced our annual mileage by half, tripled our train travel, and never took an airplane. Furthermore, what if we became vegetarians, ate only local organic food in season, bought only second-hand clothes, furniture and appliances, never went to movies, bars or restaurants, and recycled or composted all our waste? Even then our combined carbon footprint would be 7.3 tons per year, but that would get us just below the world average of 4 tons per capita annually.
It's simply not worth it. And there is another problem with the above scenerio...after you have made all these changes, have you not become the classic definition of a 'Hippy'? No Thanks!!!