Your girlfriend just bought you roses. They're beautiful. Where did she buy them?"The grocery store," she tells you.
"The grocery store?" You are outraged. "The one that imports roses from Kenya? You bought roses that spit out more carbon in the air than I'll ever exhale?"
You're being a tad dramatic. Despite your degree in environmental law, you haven't calculated how much carbon you'll exhale over 80 years.
Moreover, you're wrong about the carbon footprint of those roses. Many of us assume the further a product has to travel to get to us, the more carbon it's costing the planet. Our assumption is based on bad math and incomplete information.
For example, those roses from Kenya cost less carbon-wise because they are fertilized by compost and grown in the open-air. Roses from Holland, on the other hand, are grown in heated hot houses. Those houses actually have a greater carbon footprint than the high altitude jet travel used to transport the Kenyan roses.
I've pulled this example from the New Yorker's article "Big Foot" by Michael Specter. Specter writes that much of how we choose to limit carbon consumption is based on poor information, and our drive for carbon reduction is moral, not scientific in nature.
The result, he suggests, is a hodge-podge of carbon restrictions and feel-good ad campaigns. Government restrictions, real math and a hefty fee for emissions are a few of the ways his sources suggest carbon emissions can be limited.
The article is free on the New Yorker's Web site.
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