I found myself in the same situation - a SUV on one side of the garage and a Prius on the other side. On our last vacation (to the inlaws - not really a vacation if you ask me) - we noticed a ton of trucks on the road (while we were sitting in traffic and the kids were fighting with each other). My wife made a comment to me about the pollution being emitted into the air and how we should try to reduce our carbon footprint etc...
I ended up logging on to Envirocitizen.org and purchased 2 SUV offsets. Their process is very easy and I got a neat little certificate in my email from EnviroCitizen and CarbonFund which confirmed my purchase.
I know it isn't much but every little bit helps - if we could all make one small step to reduce/offset our carbon footprint (I can't give up my SUV - 3 kids and a dog), collectively we can make a huge difference. Just my two cents....
OK, let’s be practical. Not everyone can just ditch their minivan, even if they have green leanings.
One of my friends has six kids and another one has five little ones. Obviously, neither is a candidate for a teeny-tiny “smart” car. And even though virtual events (like the cyber-autoshow I wrote about yesterday) are bound to take off in the corporate sense, I’m reasonably sure virtual weddings just aren’t going to go over with very many brides.
Those are the very practical motivations behind EnviroCitizen.org, an online site that combines information about a variety of green topics with the ability to purchase carbon offset certificates via Carbonfund.org. There are more than 1,000 articles on the site focused on sustainable lifestyle tips and habits.
Mike Valenti, founder of EnviroCitizen, says while many other carbon offset sites make the assumption that their visitors are greener-than-thou, his site acknowledges some of the practical barriers that prevent people from being as environmentally sensitive as they might like.
“The most common thing that our visitors are offsetting is an SUV. They might have a hybrid on one side of the garage, but there is an SUV on the other,” he says.
There are two projects that EnviroCitizen’s offsets currently fund, both of which are more practical than revolutionary in nature.
The first is The Truck Stop Electrification project. The focus is pretty simple: this is an effort to provide electric hookups at stops from Arkansas to California to New Jersey so that drivers don’t have to keep their trucks idling just to check their email or keep their sleeping cab warm. The second project is a gas-to-energy project at a landfill in New Bedford, Mass., that is used to fuel four reciprocating internal combustion energy generators.
