Thursday, April 27, 2006

Rainy Day

Well thanks to the much needed rain my softball game has been cancelled. I was looking forward to playing tonight but oh well. I really need to find a batting cage this weekend to get some hitting practice.

This morning on the way to work I was listening to NPR as I usually do to catch up on my news and heard a story about a non-profit, TerraPass that has partnered with Ford to set up a system similar to industrial emmissions trading for vehicles. Essentially, it's a way to buy pollution credits to compensate for the CO2 that your vehcile produces each year. Anyone can sign up, even if you don't have a Ford (I think it's a marketing ploy for Ford creating the partnership) and the credits aren't that expensive. For my 1995 4wd automatic Explorer it's $79.00/yr and that covers 20,000 pounds of CO2 and my Explorer supposedly emits 13,812 lbs of CO2. The money you pay for the credits goes to fund wind plants and a biomass recovery plant. Pretty cool stuff. I'm not sure if I'll sign up but I may give it a go. At least it'll compensate somewhat for driving an SUV.

To see how much you pollute you can input the year, make, and model of your vehicle and how much you drive annually. It asks for your e-mail to run the analysis but if you uncheck the box next to the address box it'll let you do the test without signing up for the listserv.

If you're interested in other green energy alternatives you can sign up for NC Green Power if you're in North Carolina. I haven't done this either but may in the near future. It only adds a couple of dollars to your electricity bill a month and you "get" your power from renewable sources. I'm pretty sure other states have similar programs as well if you're not in North Carolina.

Ok I'm done with my hippy post.

2 comments:

ben said...

Hippy ;-)

Georgia has a similar program to NC. At least they were working on it and approved it while I was working at the Commission. GA has the problem that there isn't a whole lot of places to get wind power (making it expensive). Most of the power will be coming from methane retreval at dumps (at least that's what I remember), and low impact hydro-electrics.

Link to GA Power Green energy

Anonymous said...

I got laughed at for being a tree hugger yesterday. They sent me a joke about Tree Huggers and went I figured you wouldn't like it and started laughing. I can't figure out why being a tree hugger is a bad thing. I get frustrated when they throw away so much paper and don't recycle it. I walk over to the recycling bin and throw it away...haven't figured out it if they actually do it or not. And I said too bad we can't just edit the drawings on the computer instead of marking the drawing and sending it back to the contractor...save paper and money oh boy!

oh well
What was the link for the car test thing I didn't see it.
Jacs