“Your annual carbon emissions are 22,863 lbs,” sez the Slate Green Challenge quiz. I think that’s considerably less than the average person, but I’m not sure, cuz I accidentally closed that window before looking at the national average. Oopsie.

But anyway. If you haven’t heard about the Slate Green Challenge before, it’s this: A challenge to cut 20% of your CO2 emissions in 8 weeks. There are prizes and stuff.

The challenge is in week 6 already. But fear not — I managed to catch up in just an hour this morning :P

Basically, each week gives you some tips for reducing CO2 emissions in one area of your life — then gives you a quiz letting you “pledge” to make certain changes. My results:

Week 1: Transportation. Score: 4635. I pledged to check my tire pressure monthly, and to get my air filter changed regularly — I even made an appointment with the Honda dudes to do this on Monday! Also, I need to take 2 fewer plane trips in the next year, which I think will be easy cuz lately I’m discovering that — what with the liquids issues and all — flying’s way too stressful for me.

Week 2: Heating. Score: 1800. At this point, I started to realize that these scores were rather confusing. For ex, I’d been checking “yes” for things I’d been doing already — like setting the thermostat lower. I’m pretty sure this gave me a higher CO2 reduction score, though I hadn’t actually reduced anything cuz I didn’t pledge to do anything new — only to continue doing what I’ve been doing. However, since I can’t figure out how to get my heater to work in my new apartment, I’m guessing that I’m inadverdently saving some extra CO2 anyway…

Week 3: Food. Score: 1297. So with this quiz, I started selectively not checking yes if I was already doing something — thus the lower score. I didn’t really pledge to make any new changes here, cuz I already don’t eat red meat and shun food packaging as much as possible…

Week 4: Clothes. Score: 540. Since I don’t own my own washing machine, I can’t pledge to buy an energy star one. Oh well. One change I pledged — to line dry. A clothesline’s on my shopping list.

Week 5: Electricity. Score: 863. I’m not making a whole lotta changes here, though I got some points for randomly checking some of the stuff I’ve already been doing, like unplugging appliances and using CFLs. Since I’d rather not replace my TV and other electronics with energy star unless said electronics are no longer working, I didn’t get a lotta points.

Week 6: Holidays. Score: 15. Why so low? I stopped checking the stuff I was already doing altogether. I’d like to think though, that since I don’t have holiday lights at all, my holidays are pretty eco :)

And thus I did 6 weeks of work in an hour :P Thoughts for now: My overall score’s gonna be totally inaccurate, since I went from enthusiastically getting points for stuff I’d already been doing to pretty much not getting points for anything. Eh.

Update, 12/15/06: I worked on the last couple weeks of the challenge here –

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