When we started calculating our emissions, we audited our energy use between December 1, 2005 and December 1, 2006. We are retroactively carbon neutral since December 2005. The bulk of our emissions comes from air travel. We counted 414 separate plane flights. If you would like to feast your eyes on a gloriously dull table of those flights, you can find one right here. As you can see, we counted these meticulously, since they are by far the most significant source of emissions and also easy to quantify. Next we added in the driving we do in small rental cars around the country and locally, in the Bay Area. This is an impossible task, so we took our best guess, which was 10,000 miles of accumulated driving. Next we approximated the emissions caused by shipping supplies and equipment to and from our office. This is also difficult, and we figured that all our shipments would be comparable to 40 separate shipments of 50lb packages, each being shipped 1000 miles. Then we added in the emissions created by our office, based on the type of building, square footage, approximate number of days used in the year, and source of energy that contributes to our local electricity grid.

There were other things we DIDN'T include in our calculations. The main one was hotel accommodations. We chose not to include emissions caused by our hotel stays because it seems like something that would fall into the domain of the hotel's business rather than our business, plus it would have required days of work to try to get even a vague idea of what the hotel emission data would look like. There were other things that we didn't include because they don't apply to our company, or the emissions were negligible. These include manufacturing, warehouse space, generator usage, waste disposal, and so on.

Once we had our data, we turned it over to the company that sold us our offsets. They calculated that we were responsible for approximately 340.6 metric tons of carbon dioxide. We paid $3,088.22 to offset that amount. The company we used for this process is Native Energy. They were the same company to offset the emissions caused by "An Inconvenient Truth" (the film and the book), as well as Al Gore's travel in support of the film. We recommend them.

We wish that we could link to some authoritative organization who could certify that we are, in fact, carbon neutral. It would be nice to have some clear standards and definitions to guide this process. However, at this time it seems that there is no such authority to offer these type of standards. In the absence of such an authority, we are open to any suggestions that our loving public may have about the way we have gone about this. Contact us if you would like more literature on the methodology for forecasting how much energy will be created by the projects we are helping to fund.

We encourage all businesses to join us by partially or fully offsetting your carbon emissions!