Like many others who have been in Washington for a long time, I've noticed the dark bare spots on Mount Baker nowadays in the summer, a mountain which in my childhood memories was a perfect white all the time. And by now most of us have read that the same is happening with glaciers worldwide. Definitely things are warming up.

Although chemical pollution, unsafe food, unfair treatment of labor, the US healthcare fiasco, and corporate control of media are big issues for progressive Americans, the problem of global warming could easily dwarf all of these other problems combined.

Politicians have so far been mostly skirting this issue, ignoring the possible need for a major shift in our way of life. Perhaps they're afraid that if they tell the truth, they won't be re-elected. And perhaps, like many of us, they're just not completely sure of the problem, and are hesitant to sound an alarm.

In 2005, Seattle Mayor Greg Nickels made a pioneering pledge to make Seattle compliant with the Kyoto Protocol, in order to help fight global warming. His pledge, which at first glance seemed a fairly broad and ambitious one, was quickly interpreted rather narrowly to refer only to the operations of departments in the city government.

But Nickels' initiative does encourage the question: how far away from Kyoto compliance is the typical Seattleite or Washingtonian? Although Nickels himself seems unwilling to look deeply into this, somebody's got to lead the way, and--as many times in history--that duty apparently falls to alternative journalism.

Certainly there is a lot at stake in the question. By some scientific accounts, we are on the verge of pushing the Earth into a feverish state, making our own habitat mostly uninhabitable for our own species--not to mention probably most other species--over the next century or two. Not the smartest thing to be doing.

Although it's plausible that global warming could also partly be caused by a cyclical increase in solar radiation, there are very few climatologists who would release fossil-fuel-burning human activities from a major chunk of the responsibility.

George Jartos

Regardless of the level of human responsibility or the uncertain time it will take for the more serious consequences of warming to be felt, there are other reasons to wean ourselves from fossil fuel. The fact that they produce large quantities of toxic and unhealthy air pollution. The fact that they are limited geologic resources over which national leaders feel compelled to fight hugely expensive and destructive wars. The fact that Americans are deep in personal debt, and need to trim expenses anyway.

The sooner we can live without fossil fuels, the better. Since the Kyoto Accord aims to be a starting point for doing that, let's climb aboard, even if our national leaders won't.

But wait! That really does require taking a close look at ourselves.

Many of the people who read this newspaper probably think of themselves as environmentally conscious and ecologically responsible. But a hard look at our normal American lifestyle--even a frugal American lifestyle--is in order. Are we even close to being Kyoto compliant, and even if we were, would that even make much of a difference in lessening the enormous specter of global warming?

Contrary to what you might think, the Kyoto Protocol is asking for a rather modest seven percent reduction in greenhouse gas emissions in developed countries--based on 1990 levels--by the year 2012. If the US joined this protocol (it never has), it would mean a goal of close to 10 trillion pounds of carbon dioxide for the year 2012, down from the 1990 level of 10.8 trillion pounds.

Because the US population is estimated to be about 316 million by 2012, that would mean an average carbon dioxide goal of about 32,000 pounds per year per American. There are other greenhouse gasses involved in the Kyoto agreement, but carbon dioxide is the biggie.

One sad fact is that American production of carbon dioxide has gone unabated, and our per capita output in 2003 was almost 44,000 pounds.

According to a formula developed by the National Audubon Society, about two-thirds of carbon dioxide production in America is indirect, from the manufacture and shipping of the goods and services we buy and use; the exact individual responsibility for this part is hard to determine on an individual basis. However, the remaining third is from direct consumption of energy, and is much easier to calculate on an individual level. Since one third of 32,000 pounds is about 11,000 pounds, that becomes the unofficial Kyoto goal for American individual emissions of carbon from direct consumption.

Keep in mind that this goal for Americans is much higher than the same goal for people in most other countries, simply because we have already for years tended to consume extraordinary amounts of energy.

In 2003, half of the world's nations and territories, including both China and India, produced per capita only 7,000 pounds or less of carbon dioxide, from both direct and indirect use of energy. That's one-sixth of the US per-capita of 44,000 pounds in the same year, according to data from the US Department of Energy's Carbon Dioxide Information Analysis Center.

But then, that other half of the world doesn't usually drive cars.

Calculating Extravagance

The average yearly distance that a passenger car is driven in the US is nearly 12,000 miles. Because each mile driven corresponds to about a pound of carbon dioxide emissions (for a fairly typical 20 mpg car), that means that many typical lone American drivers are already producing more than their total Kyoto allotment for individual direct use of energy, simply by driving.

Of course, this number is mitigated, sometimes greatly, if you often ride together or carpool. If you always ride as a twosome, your per-capita use would be half that of the lone driver.

Urbanites who think that taking the Metro bus will get them off the greenhouse hook are likely wrong. Those hulking vehicles can guzzle fuel, and emissions average roughly 0.5 pounds per mile per rider, half that of the car. This can still add up to quite a lot. If your bus is electrically powered, as many urban "trolleybusses" are, the emissions may be much less (depending on whether your electricity is sourced from clean generators or fuel-burning generators). If the bus route is typically packed like sardines, it will certainly be more efficient as well.

As for air transportation, roughly 0.7 pounds of carbon dioxide are emitted for each mile per seat on a commercial airliner. That 2,000-mile round trip between SeaTac and LA is about 1400 extra pounds of carbon dioxide. That 9,500 mile round trip to Tokyo (not even far by international travel standards) creates about 6650 extra pounds. In one flight alone, your share of the airplane's fuel would produce nearly as much carbon dioxide as the average person in the world does in an entire year, for all activities.

But our individual fossil fuel consumption doesn't stop at transportation. Oh no.

Home heating is another major factor in direct individual use of fuel. If your home heating is by natural gas, in an average-size Washington home you can easily use 500 to 1000 therms of gas per year. At 11 pounds of carbon dioxide per therm, this equates to a ballpark figure of about 8,000 pounds total, lower if the house is well-insulated. Divide by the number of people living in the house to calculate the per-capita.

We have a lot of clean hydropower electricity in Washington, but we shouldn't be smug about it. Roughly 6% of the electricity that Seattle City Light supplies is sourced to carbon-burning generators, a proportion that is likely similar for many electrical customers in other parts of Washington as well. As a result, our electricity still contributes about another 0.1 pounds of carbon dioxide per kilowatt-hour used. A typical-sized Seattle house that does not use electric heating might yearly use about 13,000 kwh, thus about 1300 pounds of carbon dioxide. Again, divide by the number of house occupants.

If an enviro-friendly Washingtonian uses a car sparingly (say 4000 miles per year individually and 1000 miles with a carpooler) takes the bus for his/her work commute (say 2000 miles per year) takes one air trip to Tokyo or equivalent per year (or smaller air trips of roughly the same total mileage), heats his/her home with natural gas (a home shared with two other housemates), and uses typical Washington electricity, then his/her personal direct production of carbon dioxide will be in excess of 16,000 pounds. That's well above our Kyoto goal of 11,000 pounds.

How many people do you know in Washington who are actually living up to the Kyoto goals? Probably not many.

Even the frugal among us are living rather extravagantly by world standards.

Combine those results with this rather shocking revelation: according to the magazine Nature (October 2003), the Kyoto goals, if achieved on a world basis (which is looking rather unlikely at present), will only lead to a maximum betterment of about a half a degree Fahrenheit in world temperature by the year 2050, a fraction of the 2.5 to 10.4 degree Fahrenheit rise expected over this century. That's why many environmental scientists are now saying that we must drastically curtail carbon dioxide emissions--to 5000 pounds or even less per year--pretty darn soon, or else face the threat of a self-imposed genocide, not to mention the mass extinction of other species.

What does this mean for our lifestyle? Will we have to trade in our SUVs?

Let's be serious. Even the Toyota Prius will not rescue us from this. Not unless we keep it in the garage most of the time. Using busses and public transport as a replacement for cars doesn't help as much as you might think. It just makes the emissions somewhat less. Even electric cars can't save us, if the electricity is not clean.

Might as well get serious about the problem of air travel, too. A couple years ago, I was at a silent auction fundraiser for Washington Conservation Voters. Some of their most valuable auction items were "Eco-tourism" airplane trips to Pacific islands or equally far destinations. What irony! In the act of enjoying, with the desire of conserving, we are in fact destroying.

Carbon Offsets: A Copout?

Wouldn't it be great if we could just buy our way out of the global warming mess, and continue living the way we do? Well, some of us have started to do just that.

In Seattle, Mayor Nickels' pledge has resulted in the Seattle city government buying "greenhouse gas offsets" to cancel out the emissions produced by city departments. In one such deal, Seattle City Light has purchased 300,000 metric tons of carbon offsets from Du Pont Fluorchemical, which has developed a method to destroy a potent greenhouse gas emitted during the manufacturing process of the refrigerant Freon. Seattle City Light has, in effect, sponsored a portion of that operation. Through this and other offsets, Seattle City Light achieved "zero emissions" for the year 2005.

In fact, this is just a small model of what the Kyoto Protocol has only recently begun to open up: an international trading market in carbon offset credits, in which developed member countries--with their huge amount of emissions--can buy their way into Kyoto compliance by sponsoring greenhouse-gas reduction efforts in any location. The goal is to create more efficient, less polluting industries in developing countries as well.

The Washington state government has jumped right into this ethos. A recent pamphlet entitled "Global Warming: Facts & Solutions," put out by Washington state and the federal EPA, simply outlines the investment opportunities in the "emerging clean energy economy," as though business investment will solve the climate problem.

Such market solutions are not without some merit. Biodiesel is a good example of a commercially-produced fuel that is potentially much kinder to the planet. Because it is vegetable-based and requires crop cultivation, it is in some sense "carbon neutral": the carbon released into the atmosphere by burning it is balanced by the carbon absorbed by the plants grown to make it. It makes no difference to the earth how the carbon cycles. The important thing is not to let the carbon just spill one-way, into the air all the time. Offset trading which encourages biodiesel or clean electricity could certainly be a positive development.

But like other market solutions, offset trading can also be tenuous, open to manipulation, and limited in scope.

In the end, when you have purchased all the offsets you could afford, and others have performed all the offsetting they possibly could, then where will we be? Absent any fraud in the offset market (which is major wishful thinking), we will likely still be faced with the problems of overconsumption, and a world which is still heating up.

Although I would guess that offset markets will probably result in some net environmental benefits, we need to make major lifestyle changes as well. This is what politicians--and most citizens--are unwilling to face. Has Seattle mayor Greg Nickels even suggested to anyone to turn their heating thermostats down, even a tiny amount? Maybe he feels that he'd probably be recalled from office if he did.

But the truth remains that, in addition to purchasing carbon offsets, it's even more necessary to simply re-examine our need for so much travel, so much home heating, so much refrigeration, so much energy use.

Governments need to promote social solutions such as alternative food preservation, for example, so that people won't feel the need to have huge American refrigerators with more Freon. After all, nobody had refrigerators until the last few generations, and people succeeded in living rather happily for the most part.

Isn't it ironic, too, that--in the winter in Washington--we heat our homes and then cool our refrigerators, when there is plenty of free cold air outside? There surely has to be a variety of simple low-tech ways in which many people could use the outside cold air to eliminate a lot of need for refrigeration. (Keep your fresh veggies out in the cool porch, for example.) And as far as home heating goes, the best equipment to start with is a warm sweater and some longjohns or tights. Conserving energy isn't rocket science, and doesn't require trading schemes, thank goodness.

Under Kyoto-like offset schemes, the problem is that most social solutions and low-tech solutions for addressing global warming cannot be patented, trademarked and commodified, and are thus mostly ignored because it's hard to make a buck out of them. Unfortunately, these sorts of solutions may be the best in the long run. The limitations of the market may be part of the obstacle to really saving our habitat.

In a somewhat funny twist on offset schemes, websites such as CarbonCounter.org and TerraPass.com help you calculate your direct carbon emissions, and then tell you exactly how much you should donate to them in order to offset your personal emissions. Likely the projects that these two organizations support are very worthy, but from the perspective of the donor, is it more an actual carbon offset, or an offset of guilt? It seems kind of like buying your way into heaven (or a more apt metaphor might be buying your way out of hell).

We should knuckle-down to the truth: offset schemes are not a complete measure to get the job done on cooling down the warming. Offset schemes also tend to commodify global warming, as though it were another product to be bought and sold, eliminating our personal responsibility to make real lifestyle changes. This is a huge potential mistake.

Our Consumption is Consuming Us

As mentioned above, most of the carbon emissions you cause are not due to direct consumption of energy. Most of them--roughly two-thirds--are indirect: for example, the fuel used in transporting bananas from Central America to US grocery stores, and the fuel used for production of factory items in China and their shipping and distribution to US retailers.

Although it would be extremely difficult to track your exact portion of responsibility for all these indirect uses of carbon-based fuels, it is rather easy to point out what could drastically lower your overall individual responsibility. The following ideas come to mind:

Lifestyle Solutions

*Buy less. It lowers the need for production and shipping.

*Buy local. It lowers the distances that goods need to be transported. Farmers markets are good for this.

*Buy second hand whenever possible. It's not just cheaper, it's the right thing to do. It eliminates the need for energy to fabricate new goods.

*Drive less, use a smaller car, or get rid of your car. Use the bus as a replacement.

*Move closer to work and closer to shopping.

*Travel less. Enjoy things closer to home.

*Get interested in hobbies and activities that consume less energy and don't require much driving.

*Minimize home heating and other energy use.

*Maximize energy efficiency.

*Use your appliances less.

*Switch to smaller refrigerators.

*Turn your thermostat down.

*Become comfortable in smaller houses, or with sharing larger houses with more people. That saves a lot on per-capita energy use.

*Use less hot water in general.

*Don't take showers unless you're truly dirty or smelly.

*Don't wash clothes every time you wear them, unless they're truly dirty.

*Practice birth control to stabilize the population.

*Move close to work.

Low-tech Solutions

*In the winter, dress warmly at home instead of using a lot of heat. Longjohns or just tights help a lot.

*Try traditional food preservation that does not require refrigeration. Use the cool porch instead of the refrigerator

*Use bicycles and other pedal-powered vehicles.

*Insulate your home. Top-floor attic/ceiling insulation is generally the place to start. Use curtains that prevent drafts around windows.

*Conserve hot water through easy technical means: The outlet pipe of your hot water heater likely has a knob that you can partially close. It will lower your hot water pressure somewhat, and help save energy. You can also turn down the thermostat on the water heater, and install a mechanical timer which turns off at night and during the day when no one is home.

*Install a passive-solar rooftop water heating system. Many such systems require no high-tech materials and can tie into your existing water heater, greatly reducing your use of energy.

*Use energy-saving light bulbs. (One problem is that compact fluorescents contain mercury. If you use them, look for the low-mercury types. LED lights are now becoming more common, and might be better.)

*Use condoms. They are a low-tech and entertaining means of keeping population down.

Social Solutions

*Enjoy leisure travel close to home. Suggest that people can enjoy the exotic nearby.

*Encourage the conversion of larger homes into smaller units and apartments, and counter the wasteful extravagance of large personal spaces and huge single-family homes.

*Strive to keep extended family closer together geographically, so that less travel is necessary to visit them.

*Personally invest in clean, renewable electricity.

*"Proximate commuting": cities and counties can develop laws which encourage people to live close to work, and which encourage companies to hire people who live nearby.

*Expand public transport, especially low-emissions or biodiesel powered.

*Ration long-distance air and car travel and/or tax it considerably, such as through a federal gas tax.

*Support family planning, zero-population growth, and a gradual decline in population.

Do these solutions seem a dreary burden to you, or a stimulating challenge? I certainly hope it is the latter. Faced with problems of our own making, we should respond in a caring and creative way. We should change the way we live.

As the Reverend Peter Sawtell of Eco-Justice Ministries has written, "...we can't smooth out the world's inequalities by making the poor much richer. Because if everybody lived like the average American... it really would take six planets to meet all our needs. In a limited world, we can only achieve a more even distribution of resources if the wealthy stop consuming so much. In a limited world, we, the wealthy, must be seen as the problem, not the ideal. That is a direct challenge to most economic policies."