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So I saw An Inconvenient Truth this past Friday. It was quite good. Informative, entertaining, and quite shocking. I highly recommend going to see it.

A lot of what was covered, I studied in college. That was ten years ago, it was convincing then, and the evidence has simply been mounting since I last looked at the research. I’d have to say, things are worse than I had thought, and I’m a famed pessimist among my friends.

On the positive side, there are lots of things you can do to reduce, or even eliminate, your own greenhouse gas emissions, or ‘carbon footprint’. I’ve had a subscription to Carbon Planet since July of 2005, where they allow individuals to purchase carbon credits. In short, they purchase ‘credits’ that are created by the New South Wales Government’s forestry agency when they plant trees. The trees remove CO2 from the atmosphere, and store it as carbon. So, you can eliminate the equivalent of your own CO2 output by purchasing these certificates.

Another interesting consumer option is called TerraPass, an organization that allows you to buy a ‘pass’ to offset your driving CO2 emissions. The money for the pass goes to sponsor projects that guarantee carbon reduction, “clean energy such as wind and biodiesel; biomass such as dairy farm methane; and industrial efficiency.” They include window decals and a bumpersticker to help spread the word. There’s even a TerraPass for Businesses program.

While the TerraPass is aimed specificly for consumers to offset their driving, there’s no reason you can’t purchase a larger pass, or more of them, to also offset other carbon emitting activities. Personally, I’m very fond of purchasing green electricity directly. In Massachusetts if you have Massachusetts Electric (a.k.a. National Grid) you can participate in the GreenUp program, to buy 50% or 100% of your electricity from clean, renewable sources for a few cents more per kilowatt-hour. Providers elsewhere offer these sort of things too, so it pays to check them out.

There’s the simple and expedient method of replacing your incandescent light bulbs with compact fluorescent ones. “If every household in the U.S. replaced one light bulb with an ENERGY STAR qualified compact fluorescent light bulb (CFL), it would prevent enough pollution to equal removing one million cars from the road.” Compact Fluorescent bulbs are not that expensive, save electric costs, and last a lot longer than regular bulbs. When I moved into my apartment a year ago, I replaced all the fixtures with compact fluorescent bulbs. I haven’t changed a single bulb since, and I don’t expect I’ll need to for some years to come.

The movie is good, and quite frightening. But it shouldn’t be a paralyzing fear: there are many things that everyone can do to help reduce carbon emissions. Go out, see the film, and make some changes. They’re not hard and the impact is well worth it.