Teleportation & Carbon Guilt, "we call it life"

I'm still catching up on sleep from a spectacular weekend back in the States where I had the honor of participating in the beautiful wedding between my dear friends.

After a euphoric weekend of catching up with my crew after way too long, it came time for the Sunday good-bye brunch. Naturally, the conversation turned to teleportation, as it so often does at that stage of the weekend when everyone has to think about getting back home.

It was quickly and unanimously decided that my efforts in achieving a cost-effective societal shift to sustainability would be better spent on looking into achieving a cost-effective solution to man's age-old desire to disappear, and instantaneously rematerialize in another desired location. Check out this earlier post on quantum physics and non-locality to see why the two subjects are not as disparate as one might think. 

But until that glorious day when we have that upstream solution to our global travel woes, we're left with the reality of our globe-trotting impacts, chief among them: CO₂ emissions. The impacts of climate change were all too obvious this past week back home, where record rains caused some serious flooding damage.

(Though, no it is not possible to attribute a causal relationship between anthropogenic emissions and recent extreme weather events with absolute certainty, the climate change models I've seen do call for higher participation in the Northeastern US). These pics from St. Paul's in New Hampshire, the school year ended early:

(check out this link for more pics of NH: http://mistoverfm.org/sps/flood/)

So, I'm sacking-up non-existent student budget to off-set my carbon for the trip - a very small but important step towards accounting for the true costs of activities. Here are some sites that offer the service:

http://www.carbonfund.org/index.php

http://www.carbonneutral.com/index.asp

http://www.nativeenergy.com/traveler.html?traveler

Of course, as we all know from these awesome new commercials, we got nothing to worry about, Carbon is LIFE!!!!

http://streams.cei.org/

Seriously, you've got to check those ads out -- when I heard about them it was with a touch of anxiety and sadness. I thought: "here we go again, big business funneling their valuable time and resources in a counter-productive direction." And it is that, but in such an unsophisticated, laughable way, I think it really might represent the "last gasp" of the over-politicized debate, so we can get on with working together to implement the exciting solutions that exist. It does also underscore the broad misunderstandings and potential for confusion about even the most basic attributes of the issues, and reinforces why we all need to keep learning and engaging with each other. On that note, thanks to all for the great conversations over the weekend, the interest and excitement was awesome to see. Stay going