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If she's not a hypocrite and is just very poorly informed, she could carbon offset her flights. It's not that expensive. Send her these links:

http://www.abc.net.au/news/sci...

https://co2.myclimate.org/en/f...

https://www.terrapass.com/prod...

How large a garden do you need to offset driving 100 miles a day?

That's easy enough to work out. Let's assume that your hypothetical 100 miles-per-day commute was done in a car that gets 25mpg. You'd use up 4 gallons of gasoline for your drive. Each gallon of gasoline roughly works out to 20 lbs of CO2.

Okay, so now you're working about 260 days a year, and this means you would need 20*260 ==> 5200 lbs of related lumber.

Going by how much an average tree absorbs (1100kg, or 2425lbs), your hypothetical driver would need to plant 2-3 trees a year.

Not everybody drives 100 miles a day, so not everybody would need all 3 trees to offset their driving.

Actually, aircraft don't really have any advantages. Once you get over 100 mph, the air friction becomes the primary problem. What makes the airplane (sometimes) more efficient than the car is quantity. The average bus gets about 180 passenger miles per gallon, while most planes manage about 50

(from a cursory Google summary of various sources.)
http://www.terrapass.com/blog/posts/the-denialism-s
http://www.grist.org/article/coach-buses-provide-long-distance-low-emission-convenience
http://www.ridemcts.com/about_mcts/index.asp
http://askville.amazon.com/miles-gallon-jet-fuel-boeing-737-carrying-250-passengers-500-mph-30000-feet-cost-gal/AnswerViewer.do?requestId=10537954

And you'd certainly do more damage ecologically in a Prius.

You're full of shit. But hey, you sound like you know what you're talking about, so you must be right.

The Prius has about 90 pounds of NiMH batteries in it. Those batteries are largely benign, so you could toss them into the trash if you wanted to with the rest of your refuse if they failed, but Toyota will pay you to recycle them.

Now, I think the "toxic manufacturing process" largely comes from the nickel that goes into the battery back. Now, I'm not sure how much of each cell is nickel, but I do know that your standard steel is about 10% nickel. Given that most of your standard vehicle is steel (and I'm sure the Bugatti is made of a ton of exotic materials like carbon fiber whose manufacture is more toxic than steel and can't be recycled like steel), and that the Veyron weighs about 1,000 pounds more than the Prius - even if the Prius battery was 100% nickel the nickel content of both cars would be similar.

Plus when you factor in that the lead-acid battery in the Prius is about half the size of your typical lead-acid battery, you cut the possible leakage of lead into the environment (which is much worse than nickel) in half.

I suspect that most of your assumptions about the toxicity of the Prius (and all other NiMH batteries) come from the widely debunked CNW "Dust to Dust" marketing study which claimed that the Prius alone was responsible for the widespread destruction of the area around a mine in Canada and that a Hummer (and thus a Veyron, apparently) is more environmentally friendly than a Prius.

I'll simply point you to this link: http://www.terrapass.com/blog/posts/is-the-prius-battery-toxic where in the comments the claims are quite easily refuted (see especially comment #8).

http://www.terrapass.com/blog/posts/can-six-tankers

for the slightly cheaper approach with fewer ships.
(and just as far fetched)

TerraPass sells carbon offsets for personal and business use. If you look at TerraPass for Business, you'll see they estimate something for servers in a data center. I have heard that the number includes an average power draw for the electronics, plus cooling, security, networking, and related materials -- somewhere over 500 watts.

We're considering TerraPass, though we haven't come to any conclusions yet.

I buy offsets because I think it's the right thing to do to work towards a solution regarding climate change. Eventually, it'll either be legislated (i.e: required, via a tax on fuel) or the price of oil will go so high that consumption will drop drastically on it's on (i.e. the current situation in the US).

Timothy Ball and Richard Lindzen are idiots. Lindzen argues against Global Warming the same way Intelligent Design supporters argue against evolution. Timothy Ball uses the tired "1970's global cooling consensus" argument (see here and see here), specifically quoting Lowell Ponte, and he also overstates his qualifications. I also found another article by Ball where he lists reasons why global warming is good for Canada and actually says "Thank goodness for global warming."

I suggest keeping a "green" server farm simple by outsourcing your "green".

Where I live, (Santa Clara, in Silicon Valley,) I buy solar and wind power directly from the grid. It's not the cheapest electricity, but it is affordable. PG&E, a major electric company in CA, has very low carbon output per kilowatt hour. They also allow you to sponsor reforestation, thus allowing you to recapture the carbon generated from running your servers.

It is also possible to buy carbon credits. This is where you essentially pay someone to remove carbon from the air. At the consumer level, Terrapass allows consumers to purchase carbon credits.

Here's a good read on this topic http://www.terrapass.com/terrablog/posts/000453.ht ml/

At the end of your write up you talk about trying to reduce your carbon emisions, you might be interested in a Terra Pass to offset some of your carbon load. It makes my morning comute that much less irritating, knowing my car is offset. That and its fun pissing off people driving 55 on the highway, it also gets me 40 MPG in my Ford Focus. Yea baby!

--
+1 Scatter-shot

Granted, the "new" equilibrium might be at a higher global-average temp and CO2 level than it was before we started burning oil and coal
Just a bit higher, the last time this carbon was available in our atmosphere 30-ton lizzards were the dominant life form.
There is a possibility that the higher temperature we settle on will be a shade too warm for humans to live in any but the polar/temperate zones, (well, the dry bits at least).

You can be carbon neutral. Check out terrapass. An SUV's yearly CO2 output can be offset for about $80, a standard car is about $50 (depending on how much you drive). The cost of making a round trip cross country flight carbon neutral is about $15. It's not a license to pollute but it certainly makes a difference.

Check out their faq for more info.

The changes we ought to make aren't that extreme or terribly expensive -- $15 extra for a flight is about what the TSA tacks onto your ticket for passenger harassment, er security.

You can be carbon neutral. Check out terrapass. An SUV's yearly CO2 output can be offset for about $80, a standard car is about $50 (depending on how much you drive). The cost of making a round trip cross country flight carbon neutral is about $15. It's not a license to pollute but it certainly makes a difference.

Check out their faq for more info.

The changes we ought to make aren't that extreme or terribly expensive -- $15 extra for a flight is about what the TSA tacks onto your ticket for passenger harassment, er security.

Assuming the charts are relatively accurate

Non-OPEC production:

http://www.wtrg.com/oil_graphs/PAPRPNT.gif

OPEC production:

http://www.wtrg.com/oil_graphs/PAPRPOP.gif

Gallons of gas in a barrel of oil:

http://www.newton.dep.anl.gov/askasci/eng99/eng992 88.htm

CO2 (and H20) in a gallon of gas:

http://www.terrapass.com/terrablog/posts/000181.ht ml

I just shot an average on the productions and added them together, using 60,000,000 barrels per day total production. Multiply by 365 days a year, 30 years, 19.5 gallons of gas in a barrel, 20 pounds of CO2 in a gallon of gas. Divide that by 2000 lbs in a ton and you get somewhere around 130 billion tons of CO2. If you use the same source for CO2 in a gallon of gas, which says roughly 8 pounds of water come from burning a gallon of gas, then you're talking about around 50 billion tons of water vapor. Add those together and (with the figures from Phase Shifter) and you're talking about 3.6% of the existing mass we've produced in the last 30 years alone. I tried to dig up some figures on the deforestation but didn't have much luck, but trees (which we're cutting) and grass (which we're paving over) are large consumers of CO2 and H20, so losing them is compounding the effect.

Us computer people use a lot of energy - most of it from coal and natural gas - which pours tens of thousands of pounds of CO2 into the atmosphere each year, per capita. I think most Slashdotters would agree that doing our part, as individuals, to live sustainably (at least energy-wise), is worthwhile.

It's not terribly expensive, either. You can buy $20 green tags (renewable energy subsidies - http://www.b-e-f.org/) to alleviate your residential CO2 footprint, and you can buy a Terrapass (http://www.terrapass.com/) to alleviate your car's CO2 footprint for the year ($30-80). The Terrapass gets you more bang-for-your-buck than anything I've found so far - read about their projects to understand why - it's very cool.

Green tags and Terrapasses also make great holiday gifts for your eco-minded friends.

I would also argue that this isn't exactly a "charity", but more of a *responsibility* on each of our parts, for those of us who can afford it. And yes, there are other important charities centered around people, and you should give money to them *as well*.