I’m spending a lot of time this year ramping up my tree planting initiative. I’m most likely going to merge it with my business objectives over at Judicious, Inc.
Last year I had a 100 tree goal and hit it!
This year I want to do 1,000 and also see if I can get some other companies to match me. It’d be cool to try to get 1,000 companies on board!
The main reason why I chose this tree planting goal is to reverse my carbon footprint. So the first thing I needed to look at was my own carbon footprint.
There are a lot of carbon footprint calculators online. I chose trees.org/carboncalculator/ to start off this analysis.
Here’s what I came up with:
Background on my numbers
Gasoline
I have this weird habit of only putting in $25 in the tank each week. Around these parts that gets you about 7 gallons.
Air Travel
I really don’t do much air travel these days. I have kids that go to school so traveling just ain’t a thing in our lives. We did do Hawaii this year so I put down 5,000 miles for the round trip.
Trains and Subways
I never use em.
Electricity and Gas Usage
I used 250 kwh a month in my calculations and multiplied by 12 (I’m rushing here this morning, please let me know if I botched that!).
I have no idea how much gas we use. I don’t think we use that much. I grabbed 125 therms a month off the SoCal gas website (from their example bill).
My Calcs Don’t Seem To Include Food, Clothes and Products That I Buy
This particular calculator ignores this which is a big part of your carbon footprint.
How Many Trees Do I Need To Plant?
Well, there’s a specific calculator for that at: carbonify.com/carbon-calculator.htm
My carbon footprint apparently ranges between 15 to 30 tons a year and I need to plant around 150 trees a year to offset this. Now of course, there’s a ton of debate on whether or not trees help offset your carbon footprint. Trees obviously use CO2 to grow, however, they also release CO2 when they die. In my mind, it’s better to have an organism like a tree taking out CO2 and increasing the number of trees to do that every year. Think of trees as carbon storage. Instead of it being the atmosphere it gets locked up in a tree – from anywhere to a few years to a few decades. It’s a rate problem.
Additionally, reforestation has tons of benefits for wildlife, local climate, preventing desertification, etc. Reforesting, deforested areas is a good idea.
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