I recently had a conversation with a friend about my dilemma regarding air travel: on the one hand, some of my big life plans involve seeing things that may be gone within a few generations, things like coral reefs and rain forests. And on the other hand, the primary way for me to get to the places where I can see these things is one of the main reasons they may not be around much longer. Add to that the fact that some of my very closest people are a country, or even continent away, and I just don’t know.

As we discussed this, my friend said, “Well, it can’t be that bad. You just have to make up for your flights by tightening the carbon belt in other areas.” My memory was hazy on the topic, so the best answer I could come up with was, “no…I think it’s bad…like…BAD.” But best I could remember, despite not owning a car, not running the heat, living in a studio apartment, not having shopoholic blood, and more, my carbon footprint was multiple times that of the average (i.e. in the grand scheme, wasteful and gluttonous) American. Yikes.

Well, to set my hazy mind straight, today I found a series of slides on the New Scientist website with captions including this one:

A single flight across the Atlantic can guzzle about 60,000 litres of kerosene – more fuel than an average motorist uses in 50 years of driving – generating around 140 tonnes of carbon dioxide, along with 750 kilograms of nitrogen oxide.

Ouch.

So, while I have fun with this at work:

You should have fun with this. I’m very enamored of the idea of putting the impact of our actions into terms that we can comprehend. Sometimes my brain simply can’t count high enough to make sense of statistics, and this is an interesting and fun way to get the big picture (har har).

I saw this headline at the grocery store yesterday, got really excited, but was then too cheap to spend a whole five dollars to read it. Fortunately, the boy kindly pointed out to me that I could read it online for free. Please do.

Let us for a moment take a quote from early on in this article:

The church cannot condone or bless same-sex marriages because this stands in opposition to Scripture and our tradition.

And let me respond to this quote, in the context of Proposition 8 in California, and in the name of bastardizing the intelligence of the article, with the following sentiment:

Step off my “secular” government, asshole. For ruhlz.

If you haven’t seen this, you need to read Section I right now. It’s priceless.