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."