A Big Green World - One Telecommuter at a Time

This spring, I started seeing an ad campaign on the subway about how using public transportation reduces your carbon footprint. And then last week, when I was reading the last edition of the This Old House magazine, I saw the phrase again. As gas prices rise and the summer heat (and haze) set in, I suspect we're going to continue to hear more and more about it.

A carbon footprint, if you haven't run into it, is the measure of carbon dioxide produced by human activity. It's a method of figuring out how much an activity contributes to global warming. If you want to measure your carbon footprint, which is mostly caused by transportation, you can find one of many online carbon footprint calculators to figure it out.

Before I lived in New York, I commuted 20 miles each way to work by car, putting about 10,000 miles/year on my car and, more importantly in terms of carbon emissions, emitting 4.3 tons of carbon dioxide into the environment. I happen to drive a tiny car, but if I were driving a SUV, my carbon emissions for the same ride would be 5.9 tons per year.

Although there's still a lot of talk about whether or not global warming is actually caused by human activity, it's certainly a lot more pleasant to be somewhere without car exhaust, so the less carbon dioxide that we put out into the environment, the better we'll all breathe. Working from home even just one day a week can contribute to the effort, which of course, our service makes easy. On days where I work from home, I fire up Eyebeam on my laptop, log into my OnSIP account and it's just like I'm sitting in the office.

And hey, in the spare time you're not spending on the highway, you can spend some time in your garden - after all, plants are some of the biggest carbon dioxide consumers on the planet.