According to this web calculator my carbon footprint is 7.3 tons and the average is 7.5 tons. In this case is it good to be below average?. Fec, through whom I found this site, says that his is 18.9 tons, but this is not surprising given his propensity towards the spectacular. In the comments Boyd offers this business proposition:
You know, now that I think about it a bit, if you wanted to, we
could go out and find a bunch of people who don’t have much of a carbon
footprint – the homeless maybe or migrant workers or Aborigines – and
buy their de facto non-footprints for pennies on the dollar (I’m pretty
sure that most of them are not that up on this stuff yet to realize the
gold mine they sit on) and sell the unrealized carbon use for full
retail. We’ll be rich and Al Gore will be happy and the planet will be
saved via market capitalism.Why hasn’t anyone thought of this yet?
If they get serious about this proposition I’ll offer my services as VP of the Aborigine market. I’ve always wanted to go to Australia and for once I’d like to be out in front of the Democrat and Republican power brokers in the "taking advantage of peoples’ ignorance and fear" department. We need only wait for the memoirs of Cheney and his henchmen to have a road map to success in this endeavour.
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Befuddled 
4.75
I don’t drive very much, and I have a really energy efficient car. My husband offsets me, though, with the daily Charlotte commute, I’m sure. I’ll tell him to give me some money so he feels better.
24.4 Beat that. For shits and giggles, I assumed that I and the other 400 cattle on the plane didn’t fly to London and back (just once) and drove 100 Prius'(carpooling 4 to a car mind you) across the imaginary bridge that Al Gore will build us spanning the Atlantic, we’d generate an aggregate total of 105.1, compared to the 1 the calculator gives me for flying in the 747 by myself????? This is a calculator developed for the tax code that nobody was using, so they took it here right?
Esbee,
I have to ask my wife for my allowance and unfortunately her carbon load is guaranteed to be lower than mine.
Russ,
Yeah it’s a useless turd of a calculator, which makes it even more fun to use. I don’t really know where I fall on the whole global warming debate, but it’s probably smack dab in the middle of the norm of people who believe that “yes we humans have an effect on global warming with our behavior (how could we not?)” and also believe that Gore and his ilk are a bunch of chicken littles. Hell, when something like “carbon neutral” is first adopted by celebrities you know something’s wrong.
Speaking of useless calculators, the Live Earth version debuts Saturday.
7.3? I create that much grilling.