Not Bigfoot after all

I have big feet. I do. Size 10, which sounds worse than it is, I suppose, since I'm also pretty tall. If my feet were any smaller it would probably look strange at the very least and I'd probably tip over into the bargain. I'm still haunted, though, by memories of having feet this big since I was in junior high school (hint: I wasn't this tall then and was a good bit skinnier) and so still have this sense of myself as having freakishly gargantuan tootsies. And because I've had the same sense of creeping horror that our household's carbon footprint would be equally outsized, I've hesitated to do one of those online carbon calculators. In honor of the Copenhahen summit, however, I finally broke down and filled one out. It's hard to change your ways when you don't know for certain what you're doing wrong, after all. Apparently, the average tonnage for US households is 20.4, and as poorly as I feel we're doing sometimes, I would not have been at all shocked to see us blowing through 30 or so annual tonnes. But you know what our result was? 8.43! That's eight, not eighteen, not eighty. Eight. I was (pleasantly) shocked - we must be doing something right, then. But this is no time to rest on our greenish laurels - the worldwide average for industrial nations is 11 (we're still good by comparison), but the average worldwide footprint is only 4 tonnes, and the worldwide target to combat climate change is a scant 2 tonnes. If we actually start doing some of the additional things I know we could (and should) do, I wonder how low we can go.

So... OK - feeling better, but off to do some more math. Hopefully subtraction.