BY: Mark Thrun

$12 bucks is all. $12 bucks and I can erase the carbon footprint I lay down during the course of the Democratic Convention. It seems so cheap.

Now if I wanted to erase my carbon footprint for a year, its gonna cost me a bit more. $324 to be exact. Given the amount I have to drive back and forth in the city, this seems an easy way to assuage my environmental guilt.

In its green quest, the DNC has asked all state delegations to offset the carbon spilled into the atmosphere in the course of traveling to and participating in the convention. According to the map [1] on the Democratic National Convention's official website, the Western delegations are currently leading the way. The winning delegation is to be recognized during the convention.

I love the concept. The fact that we have repeatedly violated air standards for the city this summer makes the project even more endearing. And I am certain to participate. But I have to wonder, if buying carbon offsets is so easy, does it really do anything? I understand where the money is going. And I get the benefits of investments in lower impact energy sources.

Maybe just making a payment will encourage more people to ponder their own impact on the environment. After all, reading recently about real-time home electricity monitors certainly made me envious for a meter. I can easily see me turning off all the lights in the house, obsessively trying to bring the reading down. Maybe the secondary effect of just getting people to think about their own footprint makes web payoffs efficacious.

But I do have to wonder about all those people that will make a payment and post-pone the inevitable hard choices we all need to make about the utility of our SUVs.

Of course, my personal guilt may last a bit longer. With as much as I am paying for gas, the $324 bucks will be much harder to come by these days.

Mark Thrun is an Assistant Professor of Medicine at the University of Colorado Denver and the current Medical Director of HIV Prevention for Denver Public Health where he sees patients and oversees programs and research related to the prevention and diagnosis of HIV. He is a graduate of Xavier University and the University of Cincinnati College of Medicine. He was appointed by Mayor John Hickenlooper to the Denver GLBT Commission and the Denver HIV Resources Planning Council, which he currently chairs, and by Governor Bill Ritter to the Colorado Advisory Council on AIDS. He is the Board President for Project Angel Heart, a non-profit organization delivering meals to persons living with life-threatening diseases. Mark serves as a precinct committee person for HD 5 in the Highlands where he lives with his partner, Geoffrey, and two boys, Zian and Eliot.