I’m sitting at the airport right now waiting for my flight back to the US and my itinerary for this trip just happened to fall out of my bag. After some review I realized that I’ve been on over 8 flights for this trip alone.

Being at an airport and watching the crew dump thousands and thousands of gallons into the planes I started thinking about everyone going “GREEN” and how they are all avoiding this “UNGREEN-NESS”. I make this type of trip maybe 3-4 times a year, our product development director (Haney) makes the trip about the same number of times, and that’s pretty much it, we’re a pretty small company so hopefully we’re not making too big of a dent.

“How little of a dent is it really?” I thought myself, so I looked it up.

Figuring between Haney and myself, our Asia trips a year equate to roughly 144,000 miles traveled. This is what our carbon footprint is (assuming 0 for everything else except air travel). So how little was our dent actually?

“MUCH LARGER THAN AVERAGE” apparently. In just our air travel to Asia, we exceed the national average of by about 4 times. This is 4 times what the average person’s carbon footprint is calculating ALL travel and ALL other carbon creating activities. Guess it’s a bigger dent than expected. I can’t even begin to imagine the dent that bigger companies with entire sourcing departments pumps out. Talk about some ridiculous Carbon tonnage.

But what can we, at Red Ledge, and as an industry do? I guess first off is we can reduce the amount we travel, but given the scope of the industry now and how much product is being made overseas, I don’t really see the travel dying down excessively, especially seeing how global the world economy is today.

So unless they come out with some sort of hybrid airplane or electric airplane, I doubt we can solve this problem this way.

Fear not though, the ingenious people who brought you the carbon footprint calculator also (conveniently) suggests that we can buy off our carbon sins with so called Indulgences RECs (Renewable Energy Credits). Basically we give them money and they invest it into wind power or harvesting methane from poop.

Sweet deal I thought, nothing beats throwing money at a problem to make it go away. Credit card in hand, I was ready to save the planet. Then I saw some fine print about the terms of the REC:

Hmm. So when the project is done, it will take 20 years for 1 ton of our carbon usage to be offset. So for the 30 tons we used for traveling to Asia this year and with only this share of the wind turbine, it would take…let’s see:

30 tons x 20 years = 600 years. Fantastic.

So for 10 years of Red Ledge operations (assuming 2 travelers), our Carbon tonnage should be wiped clean by the year 8009 (assuming our wind turbine doesn’t break down or need additional maintenance and improvements). Nice. In addition to my wind turbine I’m also going to start telling women that I’ve taken my 30 tons of carbon and put it in a nice little spot in the ground and eventually after a couple years, they can go and collect a diamond.

Well, I guess if Indulgences RECs aren’t the answer, I’ll just have to figure out some other way to get around the world for now.

Sinlaku and Ike, done and done.

Nothing like another Typhoon to close out a trip. But that’s how we do here at Red Ledge, XXXTREME.

So apparently there’s been some bickering going on in the Red Ledge office, something about state pride, photoshopping, Haney hating everyone and Survival of the Fittest. Being the gracious overlord I am I decided to take a non-partisan stance on this issue and let them figure it out themselves, Social Darwanism, if you will. I figure who ever has the best point will come out on top, but I will apologize ahead of time for all of you if there happens to be “Haney can Eat it” outerwear or “Ashley SUX” outerwear in the market anytime soon.

So today as I visited a restroom in China I thought to myself, “Maybe I’m being a little too hardcore. Maybe I should step in, spend some time, and try to resolve this issue.” Then I came across this:

Apparently in China they take “Survival of the Fittest” to the next level, not only do they preach the practice but actively label and segregate the “Strong” from the “Weak”.

After seeing this I decided that I’d let the team at home deal with this situation themselves because obviously,  there are those more hardcore than I.

So we have this new website up that features some hardcore technology, like Blogs. Not being as savvy as some in the whole “Internet Blogosphere” I decided to go and see what helpful hints on blogging I could find on the internet. This is what I found:

Tim O’Reilly’s Blogger Code of Conduct***

( Tim O’Reilly graduated from Harvard, everything he says must be true)

1. Take responsibility not just for your own words, but for the comments you allow on your blog

"With great power comes great responsibility"

2. Label your tolerance level for abusive comments.

"Pretty High, the abuse level, not the child"

3. Consider eliminating anonymous comments.

"Exactly what we're trying to avoid"

4. Ignore the trolls.

"Pretty self-explanatory"

5. Take the conversation offline, and talk directly, or find an intermediary who can do so.

"Reach out and touch someone, if you don't someone will"

6. If you know someone who is behaving badly, tell them so.

"To avoid this I'm assuming"

7. Don’t say anything online that you wouldn’t say in person.

"LOL 4EVA"

After reviewing these I got a little confused, I wasn’t sure whether I was following the rules for blogging or Internet dating. I figured I’d get these up here for the team at Red Ledge and all commentors on our blog as a reference (also to avoid any liability if anyone decides not to follow these rules). Hopefully everyone will follow Tim O’Reilly’s advice and get some booty dates blog on.

***Tim O’Reilly did not actually provide above pictures in his Code of Conduct