Measure Your Carbon Footprint (Size Matters)

How big your carbon footprint is depends largely on where you live, what you drive, how far you drive, whether you take public transportation, how often and how far you fly, whether you eat a lot of beef and eat local produce and how much you recycle. Seriously. It all comes down to those things.

You can take a carbon quiz at http://www.wired.com/wired/archive/14.05/carbon.html to see where you fall, whether a Deep green (smiley face), a Fair-weather eco-friend (flatline face), or a CO2 addict (unhappy face).

A confession: I have taken a spectacular fall from enviro-grace. Once upon a time I lived in that nirvana of carbon neutrality, Portland, Oregon, a densely urban (and urbane) city of light rail, bike trails and pedestrian malls. More recently I've lived in Weston, Florida, a sprawling tract home development of air-conditioned McMansions, gas-guzzling SUVs and two-hour work commutes.

Can you guess which lifestyle I liked better?

So, take the quiz and share a story.

A Bad Air Day

It doesn't happen every time I go, but an extended visit to Shanghai is enough to make me sick. The throat tightens and an itch settles in causing a week or more of involuntary coughing. As much as I'd like to clear my throat, I cannot. Dr. Golden's cough drops help, but they give only limited relief.

I always recover, however, mainly because I leave the country. But apparently hundreds of thousands of urban (and surburban) Chinese do not get better, as evidenced by recent reports that lung cancer and other respiratory complications kill thousands every month in China. And it's not just the anthropogenic causes of air pollution, such as factory aerosols.

Seasonal sandstorms off the Gobi desert frequently overwhelm Beijing . Authorities say a "sand wilderness" is encroaching on the Chinese capitol. To slow the advance of "desertification" the Chinese government has invested billions of dollars in a plan to build a "Green Wall of China," a berm of trees and shrubs to act as a buffer between the expanding desert and Beijing.

While the effort is partly an obligation by Beijing to create an environmentally friendly Olympic Games, critics say it is a mere pinprick. Only ten percent of the total area is impacted by the green cordon, say some environmentalists, and the root causes of sandstorms and desertification remain unaddressed. Nothing will change unless poverty, over-grazing, overpopulation and unsustainable development are dealt with.

Meantime, don't think that Beijing's occasional plague of sand is merely a local problem. Particularly fierce storms have been known to kick up enough sand into the jet stream where it is carried all the way around the world to the United States.

The Color of Money

Visitors to modern China are often struck by the lush greenness of its product packaging, building signage and highway billboards. Idyllic images of an unspoiled countryside play well in advertising. It seems every billboard, regardless of the product, company or service being sold, evokes a pastoral, pre-industrial China unblighted by factories and smokestacks.

My Chinese friends tell me they revere nature and pay a lot of attention to what is being lost in China. It makes some sense. China's industrialization and rush to urban prosperity began only a few years ago. Its long history is predominantly agrarian.

Still, it is amazing to reflect on the disconnect between Chinese "green" marketing and what is actually going on behind the billboards in the despoiled industrial flats of coastal China. It asks too much of the imagination to believe that personal choices of plastic or paper at the grocery store could influence environmental threats of the magnitude facing China.

Yet, Chinese governments and companies push "green" consumer concepts, from food and home appliances to shampoo and building materials. Beijing has put forward a "Green Olympics," advocating energy-saving, nonpollutant technologies like "green" toilets and solar lighting systems in stadiums.

Some Chinese historians have linked the consumption of "green" goods with Chinese civilization. This view has modern China anchored in a tradition of preserving nature in balance with human economy, of promoting health and social security with sustainable growth. If all those green billboards mean anything, they stand above all for vitality and long life, core Chinese values.

The problem is that the use of "green" labeling to make money is even more promiscuous and rapacious in China than the United States. While a mere lack of uniform standards may confuse U.S. consumers, chaos and outright illegality plague China. People's Daily reports routinely about false environmentally friendly products.

For example, news reports last year told of building material markets around Shanghai hanging environmentally friendly signs on products that clearly did not deserve them. Several flooring companies were fined for failing to disclose the formaldehyde content and off-gassing potential of products they advertised as "environmentally friendly," "toxic free" and "anti-allergenic."

"Eco" And All That

It's often difficult for even the most savvy consumers to distinguish a genuine green product or service from a gimmick. But their job may be getting harder. A New York Times report about Home Depot (June 25, 2007, "At Home Depot, How Green Is That Chainsaw?") says the Atlanta-based company put out a memo recently to suppliers soliciting products that might fit under the "green" category. Some 60,000 were submitted.

Of course only a fraction should have made the cut. Many environmentalists think Home Depot is too inclusive. For example, can paint brush makers have it both ways?: one company touts its plastic handle for saving trees; another one selling a wood handle says plastic hurts the environment.

Green marketing sells and so it's no wonder everybody is trying to jump on it. But a lot of the green movement has been given over to "voodoo marketing" in the words of a Home Depot executive quoted in the NYT (although the article clearly implies even Home Depot has been hoodwinked).

The problem is that this is new territory for everybody where no accepted broad-based standards seem to apply. Developing standards for what is truly "green" could become a profitable cottage industry for independent certifiers.

Home Depot is reportedly working with one company that will develop a "cradle-to-cradle" standard of "greenness" that rates, not just performance, but how well a product scores over its lifetime, from the sustainability of its production (how much "embodied" energy per manufactured unit), its actual efficiency and longevity and how recycable it is after its useful life.

Environmental Meltdown? Or Opportunity?

Some experts wonder if China's economic juggernaut will derail from its own success. Industrial pollution threatens to choke the country's growth rate. Toxic air and water, soil erosion and an appetite for energy fed by dirty coal-fired power generation pose enormous challenges.

There would be social and political consequences, too, of an abrupt economic downturn, some of them potentially nasty given China's history.

But the silver lining in an otherwise dark cloud is the fact that the Chinese leadership is on the case and may be well equipped in its top-down way to force necessary changes.

In a June 2007 article of Harvard Business Review, "Scorched Earth," (http://www.hbr.com/) the authors give hope that China will become a fruitful laboratory for green technologies. If shown effective they could then be exported to the U.S. and Europe.

China's current political framework is a double-edged sword. On one hand, lax regulation and local corruption allow many factories to flout environmental rules. On the other, Beijing has the power, through a combination of incentives and sanctions, to correct this and enforce its will.

But the authors go further urging U.S. corporations and other multinationals doing business in China to be exemplary corporate stewards of the environment. They should seize the opportunity to innovate, develop and refine new green technologies, products and processes. Given the high costs imposed by more restrictive regulations in their home countries, foreign companies are offered by China a chance to think and work outside the box.

Great Firewall of China

I intended this to be a sure place where my friends and associates in China could freely enter into a discussion about environmental problems, the possible solutions and our shared fate on the planet. Environmental degradation and man-made climate change respect no national boundaries.

But the Chinese government had other plans.

Sadly, it appears that Blogspot is blocked in China, for reasons that are unclear to me. From many different cities in China this web log, and many others, cannot be viewed. I have verified this by going to a website that allows you to test whether a URL is accessible within China. Check out http://www.greatfirewallofchina.org/ to see how it works.

I have been told of a "work around" that involves proxy servers. But until then, I suspect I'll be largely talking to myself.

The National Building Museum Goes Green

Everytime I go to Washington, D.C. I fall in love with the city all over again. It is the greatest, with more things to do than just about any other American city. At least more things to do if you are intellectually curious.

For the most concise, clear definition I've seen yet of what it means to be "green" you simply must see "The Green House" at the National Building Museum. For more information on this extraordinary exhibit go to http://www.nbm.org/exhibitions-collections/exhibitions/the-green-house/.

I've often felt that conservationists and "greenies" come off sounding like scolds, posing as morally superior while promoting what seems like a drab and spartan lifestyle. But The Green House exhibit clearly shows that sustainable architecture and building materials can be wonderfully colorful and creative, exhibiting a human ingenuity in design that is both exciting and ultimately good for the planet.

Anybody who declares herself even minimally "green" would have to embrace these five simple principles of sustainability in building design, as laid out in the exhibit's Green Resource Guide:

1. Optimizing Use of the Sun

2. Improving Indoor Air Quality

3. Using the Land Responsibly

4. Creating High-Performance and Moisture-Resistant Houses

5. Wisely Using the Earth's Natural Resources

The Bamboo Age

The Chinese revere bamboo for many reasons, not least of which is the spiritual and symbolic significance of the stalk, representing strength and character in the face of the elements. Flooring fabricated from bamboo is said to be "harder than oak, with the dimensional stability of steel." Who wouldn't want something that strong under your feet (to say nothing of its beauty)?

Chinese historians talk about a Bamboo Age, like a Bronze Age, in which stalks were used as utensils, tools, weapons, construction materials and the like. Gangly bamboo stalks are still widely used today as a staging material on the sides of high rise buildings under construction in Shanghai and other Chinese cities.

Bamboo flooring and bamboo furniture are a wonderful alternative to products made from oak, maple and other species that take much longer to grow. Bamboo is truly renewable, because it takes only four years to grow to maturity. (It grows as fast as grass, because it is grass!) This pitch is attractive to eco-conscious consumers who are also inclined to think bamboo flooring, with its random pattern of shoots, is aesthetically pleasing.

But like any maturing consumer trend, bamboo's attractiveness has waned in the past year or so, due in part to the flooding of the U.S. market with Chinese made flooring planks, often of poor quality. It has become just another commodity.

One challenge for bamboo flooring makers in China is to continue to improve the quality of their products. Another is to increase the variety of offerings, whether handscraped, distressed or stained. U.S. marketers must continue to educate consumers about the urgency of using building materials that are renewable, natural and beautiful.