Treading carefully

There was a good editorial in the NY Times the other day regarding the phrase "carbon footprint," and the dangers of the implied meaning and revolution that is happening. Now I don't believe that we have any time to waste regarding our actions towards climate change, but I do admit that we are in a new space and have to recognize the needed evolution of ideas and there is no one silver bullet. It won't be easy, but I refer back to the Woodrow Wilson quote. Here is a snippet of the article.

"The swiftness of this change in consciousness — and the linguistic change that goes with it — is staggering. And a little worrying. For one, it is vastly easier to find new words than it is to overturn old habits, and all too easy to mistake the ubiquity of the new carbon-speak for substantive change. Carbon footprinting — the act of calculating the size of your carbon footprint — is still a rough-and-ready business. There is every likelihood of better environmental indexes down the road, better ways to measure the scale of individual, civic and corporate environmental guilt.

What makes me uneasy is simply knowing how quickly humans adopt new phrases and how readily we confuse them with the reality — or the unreality — of our actions. The two things we seem to do most instinctively are manipulate language and create markets, and those two instincts converge when it comes to carbon footprints. Creating a market in moral carbon — offsets that counter our energy-rich lifestyle — feels a little like Rotisserie baseball, more illusion than reality."