Team Trees
If you’ve been on Youtube this week, you may have seen this multi-channel fundraiser for #teamtrees. The idea: raise $20M to plant 20M trees to help offset carbon emissions.
The recent elections just put the anti-carbon-tax UCP in Alberta and threatened to put the anti-carbon-tax CPC in Canada. I voted against the 70% of CPC votes in my riding; due to our voting system, my vote counts for almost nothing.
So, I’m voting (with my wallet) for something that will make a bigger difference: plant enough trees to offset my carbon emissions this year.
Tree Canada has this nifty calculator where you can calculate your carbon emissions and number of offsetting trees:
https://treecanada.ca/reforestation-carbon-offsetting/carbon-offsetting/carbon-calculator/
I plugged in:
- My electricity usage, from my Enmax bills.
- My driving distance, based on my own estimates.
- My air travel from my London/Athens/Turkey trip. (Holy hell, this one trip turned about to be 64% of my total emissions this year).
I got: 6.74 tonnes of carbon, and 62 trees.
And then, I decided to double that number. Because if I can afford to travel around the world, I can sure as hell afford to pay to offset someone else’s carbon emissions.
124 trees in the ground this year to help counterbalance the amount of damage I’m causing, for about $162. Seems like a good deal to me.