Do You Buy Green to Reduce Your Carbon Footprint?

I’m doing some­thing a lit­tle dif­fer­ent today…and I need your help.

Just yes­ter­day, I read an arti­cle on Treehugger.com about the ongo­ing debate: whether “greens focus too much on cli­mate change.” After all, con­sum­ing less energy and water, sav­ing nat­ural resources for com­ing gen­er­a­tions, liv­ing in clean, non-toxic indoor envi­ron­ments, and not lit­ter­ing the world with our garbage are all wor­thy goals, whether or not they affect global car­bon  emissions.

So is it really nec­es­sary to trig­ger the whole global-warming con­tro­versy when you’re try­ing to get every­one sim­ply to be respon­si­ble in their treat­ment of the planet?

In help­ing a con­ser­v­a­tive com­mu­nity to go green, I’ve found that the less I talk about global warm­ing and reduc­ing car­bon emis­sions, the less lis­ten­ers are likely to resist my sug­ges­tions over­all. As Sami Grover, author of the Tree­hug­ger arti­cle, says, “After all, every­one can get behind energy effi­ciency, cleaner air and water, and pres­tine (sic) nature—whether or not they believe that man­made global warm­ing is a real and present danger.”

And truth be told, whether con­sumers are pur­chas­ing CFLs because they save energy and util­ity $$$, or whether they’re pur­chas­ing them to reduce car­bon emis­sions, they’re achiev­ing both goals.

But there’s another ques­tion that I’m won­der­ing about: in the real world, how much do con­sumers actu­ally base their buy­ing deci­sions on whether a prod­uct will reduce car­bon emis­sions? Doing so requires a fair bit of aware­ness and com­mit­ment, as very few prod­ucts include infor­ma­tion about car­bon emis­sions in their mar­ket­ing mate­r­ial. Do peo­ple seek out this infor­ma­tion, and would it make a dif­fer­ence if they could see it at a glance?

So, I’d like to invite your thoughts in a sim­ple, short, totally unsci­en­tific, infor­mal sur­vey!

I’ll keep it open for the next 60 days and then pub­lish the results in this blog and in my e-zine (see http://www.aweber.com/b/1_w3L for a sam­ple issue).

Thanks for your time and your thoughts!

Tags: buy green, carbon emissions, carbon footprint, global warming, green consumer