Thursday, June 5, 2008

Save Five Lives, Save $142

Edmunds recently tested tips for improving fuel efficiency. Some of these tips (stop driving like a maniac; drive the speed limit) could reduce your gasoline consumption by at least 10%. So if you drive 12,000 miles per year and averaged around 25 miles per gallon, you would have burned 480 gallons of gas. If you reduced this by 48 gallons, at $4 per gallon you’ve saved $192. Of course you still burned 432 gallons of gas, and this means you contributed 4.19 tons of CO2 to the atmosphere. The IPCC estimates that the "social cost" of a ton of CO2 is $12, so you have caused a total of about $50 worth of damage.

If you feel bad about this I suppose you could buy $50 worth of carbon offsets. But I’d like you to consider something else. Global warming may increase the incidence of malaria, which already kills around one million people a year. Nothingbutnets.net has started a campaign to raise awareness and get bed nets to people in areas where the mosquito borne disease is found. So you can donate that $50 and buy five nets, which could easily save the lives of five people. (Donating to Save the Children is a good option too). And you can still pocket the $142 left in savings.

One million lives a year is about two per minute. So two people died while you were reading this. But now, by changing some of your driving habits, you can

Reduce your “carbon footprint”
Save $142
Save five lives

The only thing better than a “win-win”…is a “win-win-win.”

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