Commentary
Green Lingo in the Mainstream
July 24th, 2007 by jayb
If I asked you what a DVD is, chances are you wouldn't have too much trouble coming up with - a round plastic disk, similar to a CD, that holds movies. We say, "let’s watch a DVD" or "when is that movie coming out on DVD" with relative ease. The term DVD is a big success. It is only 12 years old and techie terms or products don’t usually get adopted so quickly when the term does not help say what it is. Let’s take a look at some of the new global warming terminology and see how those terms are doing.
Greenhouse Gas. Here is a name that helps us understand what it refers to – the gases such as carbon dioxide that when put into the atmosphere act like the glass in a greenhouse and traps the heat of the sun and warms the earth. The greenhouse metaphor helps us understand the non-intuitive idea that gases can trap heat. Grade: A.
Carbon Footprint. This one is a work in progress. Your carbon footprint is the amount of greenhouse gas that you create through your use of cars, plane travel, electricity, home heating, etc. Footprint is a nice metaphor in two ways – one easily thinks of undesirable dirty footprints in your home and one can also think of footprints left behind by us as we travel the earth.
The problem here is the carbon part of carbon footprint. Unless you're following the global warming discussion details, I don't know that the word carbon is particularly self-explanatory. While there are various greenhouse gases, carbon dioxide is the big heavyweight. Carbon Dioxide Footprint and Greenhouse Gas Footprint are too long. What about Gas Footprint or Gases Footprint? Gas Footprint might benefit from the connection to gasoline. In the meantime, we have Carbon Footprint. Grade: B-.
Carbon Offsets. Here is a name that has a tough road ahead getting to mainstream usage. You take the fuzzy term Carbon and combine it with the indecipherable Offset and you get, a reduction in greenhouse gas emissions. Offset is tough and there are other terms out there competing for our attention. Carbon Credit, for example, gets us thinking about carbon dioxide emissions as building up an environmental debt that a credit can counterbalance. But do we want global warming to sound like a banking issue? So for now we have Carbon Offset and I think it's going to remain an insider's phrase. Grade: C-.
What do you think? What is your favorite green lingo? Let us know by leaving a comment.
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Jack Rowsey said...
Actually, carbon offsets are typically created for purchase within a specific trading market. To be eligible for purchase within a market, offsets must be certified and registered under an appropriate regime, or set of protocols. For example, the Chicago Climate Exchange uses one set of protocols, and the CDM another.In the voluntary market, a variety of industry standards exist including the Voluntary Carbon Standard, Green-e Climate, WWF Gold Standard, Environmental Resources Trust and the CLimate Community and Biodiversity Standard, created by the Nature Conservancy, Conservation International and others, are emerging to provide comparable levels of verification and quality assurance. Third-party standards provide the credibility that a carbon offset is real and backed by other organizations and experts.
Posted on: May 20th, 2008 at 6:42am