Word: carbonator
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Still, human behavior isn't that easy to change. Reilly and Herrgesell point out that reducing your carbon footprint will also cut your utility costs, but that will likely require an up-front payment - in the form of investment in more energy-efficient utilities - and those remain a hard sell to American consumers. Even if you succeed in reducing your personal carbon emissions drastically, you'll likely produce only a few tons' worth of carbon credits - and with carbon credits worth around $7 a ton on the voluntary market, you won't exactly be able to retire on the payoff...
...website, which is currently undergoing an early launch, will analyze your household utility bills for a year. (You need at least 12 months of data, to set a reliable baseline for your carbon emissions before you try to reduce them.) Using that data, the site can establish a very rough carbon footprint for your household - the U.S. average is approximately 30 tons of CO2 per year per family. If you can then reduce your emissions, whether by simply using less electricity or by installing energy-efficient technology, like better boilers and compact fluorescent lightbulbs, the site will calculate how much...
...contend that only a small percentage of Americans will ever really go green for green's sake - and utilities will surely resist top-down efforts to get them to sell less electricity. But by appealing to our checkbooks instead of our conscience, My Emissions Exchange might help reduce U.S. carbon emissions better than a stack of hectoring environmental reports. "We're betting that people will respond to a positive incentive and get paid to reduce," says Herrgesell. (See pictures of the world's most polluted places...
...atmosphere - and more than a century of industrialization has helped make them rich - which would indicate that they should shoulder the lion's share of future emissions reductions. But fast-growing developing nations like China, which has already passed the U.S. as the world's top carbon emitter, will be responsible for the majority of future emissions, so any global treaty that completely exempted them would be worthless. That debate - or standoff, really - has all but paralyzed global climate-change negotiations over the past several years. (See pictures of Beijing's attempt to clean...
...paper published in the July 6 Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences (PNAS) by a team of researchers at Princeton University offers a possible way out of the diplomatic dead end. Instead of simply considering carbon emissions on a national or per capita level, the Princeton team proposes a more granular system of climate accounting that would examine the range of individual emissions within countries. Thanks to economic growth, there are well-off people in almost every nation in the world - and the global middle class and wealthy, in India or Indiana, are responsible for most of the carbon...