Random Access 3.0

The latest thing I'm reading about is some New Yorker who has decided to some how rip & replace everything she owns in an attempt to go green. Her blog, 'Green as a Thistle' chronicles her quest in this.

While I'm all for this if it works for your lifestyle, there was one thing she mentioned after talking about flying somewhere called 'Terrapass'. Apparently these nice people will tell you what your car, home or airline flight burns in the form of CO2 emissions and if you pay them now they'll invest in 'green energy' programs somewhere.

I plugged in my Camry Hybrid and I'm told for only $39.95 per year I can feel all nice and green fuzzy each year. Or for my home they wanted a nice $160 to 'balance out' the 32,000 pounds of CO2 my house causes each year.

However I have a little bit of an issue with the house. See Wake Forest, NC is powered by Progress Energy. We're powered by a Nuclear Reactor, specifically the Harris Plant. 45% of all energy produced in the Carolinas is Nuclear. The Harris plant has been online since 1987.

There is no CO2 output from a Nuclear plant. Water vapor is the smoke out of the top of those cooling towers, not CO2.

So what happens when I plug in the same numbers but put in a Kansas address that was about 2 miles from a Coal plant?

Same amount of CO2.

Are the green guys aware that 73% of all power generated that is emission free comes from Nuclear reactors? Solar, Wind and Geothermal are a whoppin 3% with Hydro at 24%. Yes, there is a radioactive by-product. But guess what, it doesn't cause global warming and with proper care and storage at a secure facility, say, the proposed Yucca Mountain facility it is as safe as it can get. But everyone from Native Americans, Hippies, anti-nuke folks, and just President Bush haters seem to be fighting it every step of the way.

So what do you do to drive that SUV & burn that coal to power your home? Pay guilt money to some company who claims to be spending it all on green energy projects. Interesting that their last verification report was from 2004 - 2005.

I think I should ask Brian to help me build a website that can take hippies money that could fund some solar panels on my roof. For only the low low price of $26,000 you could offset 30% of my monthly electrical consumption. I'd only need to find 130 people willing to spend $160 the first year to 'offset' their energy usage in CO2 emissions for my solar panels.

Then maybe I could convince my dad to start a wind farm....or buy some land west of Wichita and build a wind farm.

It'd pay for itself. People pay me to make a wind farm/solar farm.

Sounds like a plan.