It's the first Saturday of the month, time for a statistical look at how Alisan and I are progressing toward our goal of reducing our carbon footprint by at least 10% this year (we've also invested in 100% Green Power and have offset fuel consumption equal to 100% of last year's driving with TerraPass).

On the driving front, we've still got a Thanksgiving road trip planned to Colorado, which will put 1600 miles on the odometer, and we've still got two months of driving around town ahead of us. But, with 13,624 miles driven so far this year, it looks like we'll be significantly under our 18,000 miles per year average for the past couple of years. If we can keep the number to 16,000 miles or less, we'll have reduced our driving footprint by 12.5%.

On the energy use front, the numbers tell a similar story. As the table below shows, we've used 11.4% less energy during the first 9 months of this year:

While reducing the number of miles driven and amount of energy used this year has been challenging, it hasn't been inconvenient or all that difficult. Reducing our carbon footprint another 10% next year? Now that may be a little tougher to achieve — I'm still considering what our goals for 2008 should be.

Carbon Neutral Journal's stats are brought to you by Blue Spruce Cleaners.

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