All You Need to Know About Reducing Carbon in 20 Minutes

Last week's NPR interview with The New Yorker's science reporter, Michael Specter, is one of the best 20-minute summaries of "carbon" news around. Specter also published a long piece in the latest issue of The New Yorker - "Big Foot: In measuring carbon emissions, it's easy to confuse morality and science." In it, he describes carbon dioxide as "a strange but powerful new currency, difficult to evaluate yet impossible to ignore."

One of the questions Specter explores is exactly how to calculate the carbon footprint of a given product (Carbonfund.org has developed a world-class protocol in partnership with the Edinburgh Centre for Carbon Management for doing exactly that. See also our Carbonfree Product Certification program).

As Specter points out, the answers are not always intuitive. Just because your food is local, for instance, doesn't necessarily mean you're being an environmentally conscious consumer by buying that food.

If you live in New York, for example, buying an apple grown in New York actually causes more carbon dioxide than buying an apple grown in New Zealand, where they use less land, less water, and more geothermal and solar energy to grow them - more than enough to outweigh the environmental cost of shipping those apples 9,000 miles to New York.