My Blog is Carbon Neutral

I came across the term 'carbon footprint' for the very first time when I attended a seminar on wastewater treatment technologies and design. It was one of the seminars I attended inline with my first ever job - a researcher in an environmental research and consulting company.

One of the speakers half jokingly said that the only way we can stop polluting the earth is by being non-existent. To illustrate, he mentioned about carbon footprint and that every activity we do has an impact to the environment.

After the seminar, I read about carbon footprint in the internet and learned that jet-setting is one of the activities with the highest greenhouse gas emissions. That made me think twice about traveling and riding airplanes.

Carbon footprint as defined by the WWF-Philippines is

"...the representation of the effect of an entity or organization on the Earth's climate in terms of the total amount of greenhouse gases produced (expressed in units of carbon dioxide, CO2)."

You can read more about carbon footprint here, and here, and a whole lot of other resources in the world wide web which will lead to bigger words such as ecological footprint, climate change, and global warming. The last url link to Pinoy Green Academy lists some sites with a calculator that computes one's carbon emissions.

But what exactly brought me to writing about carbon footprint now is an interesting button I saw in a fellow Nawie's blogpost. The button lead me to a German website campaigning for an active participation in saving the environment by reducing carbon dioxide emissions. The "My blog is carbon neutral" button signifies that the group has planted a tree for that this blog to offset the carbon emissions generated from and by it.

Our environment is already in an alarming state. Saving, protecting, conserving and preserving it should be done in every extent possible. Having a carbon-neutral blog thus makes me feel a better blogger and a little more comfortable about my own carbon footprint.

If you're a blogger, you care about the environment and you don't have a carbon neutral blog yet, go and get that button!