Join Acterra's Cool It! Campaign

Concerned about recent reports of increased melting of the Greenland ice?

Wishing you could do something more to stop global climate change, but find you can't easily change your commute or immediately buy a more fuel-efficient car?

Join Acterra's Cool It! Campaign
Acterra's new Cool It! campaign brings you an innovative new approach to this problem. Visit the Acterra website --
http://www.acterra.org -- and click on the Cool It! ice cube banner to find out about it.

Cool It! provides a carbon calculator to compute how much you are adding to greenhouse gases (GHG), gives you ideas for reducing your use of fossil fuels and the CO2 they produce - and then offers you a way to offset your remaining emissions by purchasing "green tags."

Green tags -- sometimes called "renewable energy certificates" -- are sold by operators of wind farms and other clean energy generators, based upon how much energy they produce. You can use the Cool It! calculator to decide how many green tags you want to buy to offset your car and airplane travel and household use of electricity and natural gas.

To use the carbon calculator, you can simply click on "use the California average" to determine how much CO2 you create - or bring your electricity bill or car mileage info when you go to Cool It! for a more personally accurate picture.

The calculator also let's you try out different options - such as how much CO2 you'd stop making if you bought a high mileage car - or how much it would cost to buy green tags to offset a trip to Hawaii. (It's surprisingly less than you might think. Go to
http://www.infoplease.com/ipa/A0004594 to find data about the distance between cities.)

Of course buying a green tag doesn't actually eliminate the CO2 produced by your car or an airplane. Instead, it's a way to responsibly reduce your environmental impact by paying a little to increase the number of "green" electrons flowing through our electricity grid. Other countries that have signed the Kyoto treaty are using such "cap and trade" methods to provide a subsidy to support clean energy, and now we can too.

Buying green tags to match your energy usage is rather like buying organic strawberries. You may not be able to see a difference, but you know they are healthier for you, for farmworkers and for the planet -- and you are willing to pay a little extra for this value.

You can purchase green tags to offset as little or as much of your CO2 emissions as you choose, and on a monthly or an annual basis.

When you buy green tags through Cool It!, which is a joint project of Acterra, the Loma Prieta Chapter of the Sierra Club, and 3 Phases Energy Company, a small portion of the sales goes to support our local environmental projects, and the rest goes to clean energy producers, providing them with a financial incentive to produce power that doesn't affect our global climate.

Your green tags are certified by Green-e, a project of the nationwide non-profit Center for Resource Solutions, which certifies that the green tags you purchase meet environmental and consumer protection standards. The tags come from wind farms in California and elsewhere in the US, through 3 Phases Energy, the same company that provides power for customers of Palo Alto Green and Silicon Valley Green Power. For more information, contact http://www.green-e.org

Try out the Cool It! calculator -- and send your questions and feedback to Associate Director Debbie Mytels at debbiem acterra.org

PRIVACY
We never sell or trade your personal information, including your email address. For details see our privacy policy on our website.

TO UNSUBSCRIBE
EcoCalendar-unsubscribe [at] Acterra.org (Please note: unsubscribe may take a few weeks to take effect. Tell us the exact email address at which you receive our EcoCalendar. This is important - we can't remove you if we don't know what address to remove!).

http://Acterra.org