Fluffy towels and rising seas

THIS SUMMER I put up a clothesline and hung out my laundry, in flagrant defiance of neighborhood rules and the eye-rolling of my teenage daughter. I explained to her that running a load in the dryer puts 5 pounds of carbon dioxide into the atmosphere, where it will still be trapping heat when she is 50 years old. Since the average household does a load of laundry a day, that’s roughly a 2,000-pound annual contribution to global warming.

“But my towel feels like road kill,” she said. We compromised. It turns out that fluffing towels in the dryer for five minutes and then hanging them on the line keeps them soft. She still thought I was insane. But I told her what’s crazy is the implied moral equation: Does it makes sense to cause native Alaskan villages to slip into the Arctic Ocean so we can have soft towels? The U.S. Government Accountability Office says global warming threatens 185 villages -- and relocating just one of them is going to cost $180 million.

But by now my daughter had executed a double eye-roll with a what-a-bore sigh and gone to her room.

And I hadn’t even mentioned New Orleans.

No doubt many such annoying chats are taking place in homes around the nation these days. With gas at $3 or more a gallon, people are starting to wonder if, gee, maybe their families shouldn’t be doing something about global warming?

It turns out that doing something can be relatively painless, if only because we are so profligate to start with. The average individual American produces about 40,000 pounds of greenhouse gas emissions a year, counting less obvious sources such as household electricity. A small step, like replacing that clunky computer CRT with the LCD monitor you always wanted, saves 135 pounds of greenhouse gas emissions annually. Installing a dozen compact fluorescent light bulbs in place of conventional bulbs can save 550 pounds.

Heck, in many states, including California, you can switch to a utility supplier that gets its electricity from windmills, small hydroelectric plants and recovery of methane from landfills. This instantly removed more than 10,000 pounds of annual pollution from the dark side of my family’s ledger.

There is some pain involved. First, trying to do the math is a nightmare. For instance, a 747 traveling from New York to London emits about 880,000 pounds of carbon dioxide. But is some poor slob in economy morally accountable for the same share as someone in business class? What if the plane is only half full? And, wait a minute, 880,000 pounds is more than the plane’s maximum takeoff weight. In fact, the fuel onboard weighs only about 300,000 pounds.

Likewise, it mystifies people to hear that every time their car burns a gallon of gasoline, weighing 6 pounds, it puts more than 20 pounds of carbon dioxide into the atmosphere. The explanation is simple: Combustion causes almost every atom of carbon in a fuel to combine with two atoms of oxygen -- and oxygen is 1.33 times heavier than carbon.

It gets really painful, though, when you start adding up the numbers for your car. If you drive an SUV, such as the Ford Excursion, the typical 15,000 miles a year, you’re producing 38,000 pounds of greenhouse gas emissions annually, according to www.greenercars.com. This is like lofting the vehicle’s own weight into the atmosphere once every 10 weeks. Multiply that by the 20 million SUVs now on the road and you start to see Inuits plunging through the ice.

So what are you going to do while you’re figuring out how to drive less or where to steal a Prius? One remedy is to offset your carbon emissions. Skip soft offsets like planting trees. They don’t necessarily remove carbon dioxide from the atmosphere over the long term. Hard offsets are a better choice: Paying somebody else to use less fuel means the carbon dioxide doesn’t get produced in the first place.

For instance, www.betterworldclub.com charges $22 to neutralize the equivalent of your share of the emissions from an international flight ($11 domestic), and uses the money to replace inefficient oil-burning furnaces in public schools. Another website, www.terrapass.com, invests membership fees in wind power and reduction of methane emissions in agriculture. The Solar Electric Light Fund, at www.self.org, installs solar power in place of kerosene lanterns and generators in Third World countries.

Neither conservation nor offsets will stop global warming in our lifetime. But it’s probably a good idea to change now and not wait until the seawater is actually washing around our ankles. Think of it as a chance to feel morally righteous and enjoy the small pleasure of driving your loved ones nuts. When I head for the door these days with my laundry basket in hand, I like to give my daughter a cheesy smile and tell her I am doing it “for the children.”