A year in carbon

The odometer on my car just went over 96,000 miles, which reminded me that we had flipped 90,000 back in January when Mary and I were out at Lake Mattamuskeet. Given that my car is by far the biggest mileage vehicle in the family, that's not too bad. Mary's Prius (whom we call Beatrice) pretty much just goes to the store these days. The Subaru (AKA the "Marubaru") largely sits there while Graham is in school unless I am quite intentional about getting her out for exercise.

Admittedly, I'm cheating a little here. I probably put 1,250 miles on rental cars in Europe this summer. And maybe 300 on rental or borrowed cars in Alaska in June.

Then there was the flying. Europe, Alaska (though I did pause and stay in Seattle for extra days so as not to fly West twice), 4x to New York for George Jr's funeral, David Dennis' shiva, my 35th college reunion, and just business. Actually, the proximate motive of the last trip was to meet the children of a client with terminal cancer while she is still alive so that I wouldn't be just some random dude who is a trustee on their trust when she leaves us, so it was a pre-funereal exercise. Even on the Europe trip, I will give us credit for not just flying for four days but instead extending the trip to two weeks and vacation to be sure we made use of the carbon burnt.

I've also done a pretty good job dialing back the red meat. I really am at just about once a week and fairly often it just crosses my path at some kind of business event, which is to say I'm not consciously ordering it. Honestly I'd rather have less of that random red meat and more burgers I order at Al's or the like but such is life.

All in all, not too shabby. But tell that to the planet. Reading a pretty daunting survey in the Economist of the current state of carbon capture and storage technology and how woefully inadequate it is to the scale of the planet's problems.