I Just Hurt My Arm Patting Myself On the Back

Yeah, that's right.  I just booked a 4th honeymoon for my wife and I to the beautifully secluded island of Holbox off the coast of the Yucatan Peninsula in Mexico.  Pursuant to my previously published New Year's "anti-resolutions" for '09, I chose to purchase carbon offsets for my air travel from Dallas to Houston to Merida and back.  It's my little way of reducing blatant energy wasters from my life (well not eliminating, but at least making up for them in my treehugging capitalist kind of way).

In case any of you heathens don't believe me, here's the confirmation from TerraPass, the company that arranges for the carbon offsets through the Expedia.com web site:

Skype Gives Me a Green Christmas

I love Skype.  I couldn't make it back to Florida for Christmas this year.  No matter.  Thanks to my free Skype account, I just opened presents with my entire extended family from 1700 miles away.  Sweet!

If you don't know, Skype is an internet phone service that also lets you do video calls if you have a web cam.  It works great and the video calls are absolutely free.  I highly recommend this company.

Anyways, not only is it cool that I got to "be" my family on Christmas Eve, but I also reduced my carbon footprint by not getting on an airplane this holiday season.  Good green stuff.

Wait, I'm not Green.

"So, are you like, going green or something?"  That's what I was asked the other day by a friend who was checking out our blog for the first time.  The phrasing of it struck me as funny.  It kind of indicated that she thought of Green as a personal lifestyle choice, like say, becoming a vegetarian.  "So, you're going vegetarian?  Does that mean you have to eat that tofurkey stuff?"  

This lifestyle-type question caught me off-guard, because lately I've been thinking about Green more at the macro-economic level.  More as a gamechanging global initiative.  With Barack Obama, T. Boone Pickens, and many others talking about making huge, wide-ranging, multi-billion-dollar investments in Green-related projects, it's hard not to be fixated on the big stage.

But in focusing so much on the high-level stuff, am I neglecting to face the reality of my not-so-sustainable lifestyle?  Here's a snapshot of my life in terms of my carbon footprint:

1. I live in the Dallas-Ft. Worth metroplex, which is really spread-out and has virtually no mass-transit (all freeways, see photo to the right)
   
2. My wife and I live in a 1720 square foot townhome
3. I drive a Toyota FJ Cruiser that only gets about 18 mpg
   
4. I live about 13 miles from work; I sometimes carpool w/ the wife
5. We buy most of our "stuff" from Wal-Mart, Target, or other importers
   
6. We like to travel a lot

So, I obviously have some work to do if I wanna "go green."  My worst guilty pleasure is my FJ.  It's an "eco-foul" no doubt.  But I love it!  I don't really want to swap it for a Prius, and can't really afford to take the hit on the trade-in value.  But in a place like DFW, I really shouldn't own an SUV.  There are just too many miles to drive, too many gallons of dirty fossil fuels to burn.  But it's an off-roading beast!

Most of you probably have a guilty pleasure or an eco-foul of your own, right?  What is it?  Come on, you can admit it.  Is it your gigantic, oversized suburban home?  Your 45 minute commute each way to work?  Your obsession with turning the A.C. down to 60 degrees the moment you walk into your hotel room?  Swimming pool?  If you're a true red-blooded American, you have something wasteful to share, so let's hear it...