Last night, I was discussing the Web site with a friend who mentioned that there are several apps designed to help keep track of your footprint. These apps include offCents, Carbon, GreenFoot, MathTappers: Carbon Choices, and Carbon Footprint ACP. So, like all topics related to reducing our footprint, this one promises to be straightforward and definitely isn’t going to lead to the usual tributaries that are slowly guiding me and my boat away from sanity. Once I find a way to paddle back to the main river, I’ll share what I learn about these apps.
The whole conversation was really vindicating because it involved a friend who is way smarter than I am coming up with ideas for new climate-related policies. That’s what I truly want from this site: for my uber-competitive, highly intelligent friends (and you know who you are) to get riled up about climate change.
I’ll devote more time to the idea in a later post, but the big insight from the conversation related to capitalism. As far as I can tell, market economies are the biggest culprit in the climate problem. Even people who want to do what’s right for their children also need to keep their jobs to support their families, which often means prioritizing short-term financial gains at the expense of the long-term health of the planet.
So, if we’re going to come up with a solution to the climate problem, it will need to leverage markets. Cap and trade policies are one example. Another we discussed last night was requiring companies to report the carbon generated in its production and shipping. If stores provided those data, then shoppers could factor them in when they make purchases. As an example, I personally don’t care what brand of bread I buy, and would be more than happy to use the environmental impact of the product as a tiebreaker.
Companies like Patagonia already provide this information. And, with the sort of GPS tracking that FedEx uses to track packages, it seemed to us that it shouldn’t be too cumbersome for most companies. But what do we know…