Pirate's Cove

It’s so cute, they are totally changing their lives to match their rhetoric (via Tom Nelson)

(Boston.com) From holiday parties to shopping, the holidays tend to be a season of consumption for most Americans.  One Salem State University class, however, has pledged to give the planet a Christmas present by cutting their carbon dioxide emissions by 50,000 pounds before Christmas.

So far Lynn Fletcher’s biology class has combined to save 28,000 pounds of carbon dioxide by taking shorter showers, watching less television and turning off lights when they leave a room to name a few carbon cutting strategies..

One student started biking to the gym and using less workout machines once she got there.  Another student convinced his family not to use plastic plates at Thanksgiving and instead volunteered to wash the dishes. And another student said she has spent more quality time with her mother because they both agreed to watch less TV.

Wait, aren’t most workout machines, you know, manual? How does that reduce CO2?

Others are using a crockpots to cook instead of the oven or drying clothes on a line instead of in a dryer.

But, they’ve stopped driving, right? No? Hmph. I wonder why they are doing this?

While planning her Thanksgiving trip to Seattle to visit her sister, Fletcher thought about ways to offset the carbon emissions from her cross-country flight as well as how to engage her students in a section of her class on human impacts on the planet, “which can be quite depressing and daunting,” she said.

That’s when she came up with the idea for an assignment that is worth about five percent of her students’ grades. Since last month, the 43 students in Fletcher’s Human Sociology of Biology class have been finding ways to cut their carbon emissions in their everyday lives and calculating how many pounds of CO2 they are saving on a weekly basis.

So, teacher is forcing her students to do this, because she was bummed out about the CO2 emissions from her unnecessary fossil fueled trip.

Freshman Amber Fernandez, 18, of Salem said she’s always wanted to reduce her carbon footprint but didn’t even know how to get started until she got this assignment.

It’s not like there are tons of books out there and this Internet thingy. Of course, since most Alarmists fail to live the life, it’s no wonder.

“I’m all for saving the planet considering I live on it,” she said. “I was excited to actually have  guidelines of what to do. That’s the main reason I was excited. Without guidelines I didn’t know what to do or how to start.

Sigh. CO2 was higher during most of the time life has been on this planet. Life, and the planet, did just fine. This is not an environmental issue. It’s just plain silly.