October 12, 2006

Barnraising, the Green Way
Ballard neighbors put heads together to solve foreign wars, global warming

By AMY ROE
Contributing Writer

When it comes to global climate change, nobody rides for free. Fly, drive, or simply turn on the heat, and you produce carbon dioxide that contributes to global warming.

In Ballard, it’s payback time. The neighborhood is working to become America’s first “carbon neutral” community by encouraging businesses and individuals to cut their carbon dioxide emissions — by walking, bicycling, recycling, buying locally, and conserving energy — and to offset what they can’t eliminate by contributing to a fund that executes large-scale carbon reduction projects.

Al Gore praised the effort in his Sept. 18 speech at New York University’s School of Law.

The average Seattleite generates 12 tons of CO2 per year, says Tracy Carroll, co-founder of NetGreen (AchieveNetGreen.org), a partner of Sustainable Ballard. (Carroll, a Ballard resident, is also co-founder of FlexCar.)

Through NetGreen, businesses and individuals can calculate their “carbon footprint” and make a contribution to offset it to The Climate Trust, a nonprofit that funds large-scale projects that reduce greenhouse gases.

By NetGreen’s calculation, a hundred bucks offsets 10 tons of carbon emissions. But does trading cash for carbon let people off easy?

“It’s not paying your way out at all, but often that’s the first impression,” says Vic Opperman, co-founder of Sustainable Ballard.

Quantifying individual contributions promotes awareness of the economic impact of greenhouse gasses, and once participants “internalize” the cost, they’ll have incentive to reduce their emissions, NetGreen’s Carroll says.

The no-carbon lifestyle is the linchpin in Sustainable Ballard’s network of community-based projects. The organization, which has no membership fee, emerged in 2004 as an extension of the antiwar movement.

Over discussions in her living room, Opperman and Sustainable Ballard co-founders Erica Jones and David Wright decided that since the war was about oil, they needed to address the problem known as “peak oil” — the point at which the energy resource has been fully tapped and no new wells can be drilled. Some experts believe the world’s oil reserves have already reached their peak.

“Everything has to do with petroleum,” Opperman says.

So the trio shifted their focus to the home front.

“It was really an issue of empowerment. How do we take this frustration and do something that helps us? How do we help ourselves? Government is going to do what it’s going to do.”

But why Ballard? Why not Seattle, or Washington State?

“We live in Ballard,” Opperman explains. “The future is local.”

In two years, the group’s list has grown to 500 at-large members and spawned seven guilds, which address different aspects of life: art, craft and design; community and economy; environment, waste, and water; food, health, and medicine; home, energy, and conservation; transportation; urban planning and building design.

Each guild provides ways people can make small changes in their daily routine. They include projects such as a “buy local” campaign, a “100-mile diet” project to promote locally grown food, and a program aimed at getting people out of single-occupancy vehicles.

A Sustainable Ballard festival held Oct. 1 drew 5,000 people and, Opperman added, there wasn’t even any festival food. “Nobody was selling anything. This was actually people creating community during that day.”

In August, the King County Council signed a proclamation endorsing “Get Carbon Neutral” and groups from as far away as Cape Ann, Mass., and as nearby as Tacoma and Shoreline have contacted Sustainable Ballard for presentations and advice on how to launch similar projects in their own communities.

Opperman is quick to add that they’re not the experts, just a group of neighbors who decided to start implementing good foreign policy in their own backyards.

“We’re already living what we want to see,” she says.

And they’re starting to see it at work. Through NetGreen, businesses have begun to pay the carbon offsets of their staff.

“It’s framed as a benefit from the employer to the employee,” Opperman says. “How cool is that?”