[gajomi]

I can imagine a variant of this card that tries to tackle the point you bring up. Not all purchases are equal. Some of them have negative carbon footprints. The tree planting offsets the footprint for every purchase. These things are not easy to estimate exactly but since there are probably order of magnitude differences in carbon footprints for different products there should be useful information about the relative impact of a purchase to display to the consumer and to demonstrate the overall impact of the project.

[glaugh]

This feels very clever to me. I think people have very wrong senses of how bad various actions are for carbon footprint. I know folks who don’t eat meat for CO2 reasons (which I’m fine with) but fly across the US all the time—-sorry citation needed and happy to be corrected but I did this math once and it was roughly one year of meat = one (round?)trip.

A side-benefit, in my view, is to show that actually offsetting carbon footprints isn’t terribly expensive (for people who have the disposable income to fly across the country), which I think counters the “We’d have to shut down the economy to stop global warming” misconception that I believe a lot of people have (citation also needed here, just personal experience)

The Indulgences That Actually Work Card (in the sense of old Catholic indulgences), you could call it :)