Your Carbon Footprint: An Inconvenient Statistic
Life used to be simpler. In the "Age of Aquarius" a man, eager to start a conversation with an attractive woman, could approach with the unoriginal, but socially acceptable, question "hey, what's your sign?" In later years, as people became more health and fitness conscious, the question might have been "so, what's your BMI?" But in current society, where even weddings have turned green, you might be asked "what's your carbon footprint?" That is a bit harder to answer.
Your carbon footprint is the new personal vital statistic that you must know. It is a measure of the impact of your activity and consumption on the environment in terms of the amount of greenhouse gases produced, measured in units of carbon dioxide. Luckily there are many online carbon calculators to help you, for example: carbonfund.org. Once you know your footprint you can work on reducing and offsetting your impact.
Those of you who smartly say "I recycle everything, I even knit my cat's fur balls into mittens" don't be so smug. If you have flown on a plane recently your footprint is bigger than you think. And let's not even count all that bottled water in the throw-away container!