It might seem a little bit silly at first… until you realize that noone has ever, ever talked about cents per gallon of gas when referring to wages, and that the connection is real.
Wages for someone performing work that pulls that gallon’s emissions out of the sky. Just the same as you can pay someone to pump gas, you can pay someone to remove gas-related CO2 emissions. It may be more indirect, intangible, and happen on a different time scale, but it’s just as real.
It’s not some roundabout, fancy derivative calculation, either. The dots connect. The dots are pretty much welded together. Wages for the poorest people in the world = your CO2.
To four decimal places.
The number is 4.2196 cents per gallon (CPG). From our calculator methodology we know that burning one gallon of gasoline emits 19.4 pounds of CO2 into the atmosphere. That’s .008798 tonnes. When you offset your CO2 footprint through our first project in Nicaragua, which has a donation rate of $8.80 per tonne and where 54.5% of your donation will go to the community for planting trees, that comes out to 4.2196 CPG.
Interestingly, every car was created equal in its ability to address economic inequality. Every car gets 4.2 CPG because the CO2 content per gallon of gas doesn’t discriminate against specific makes or models. If we were talking about wages per mile, that would of course be another story. Less fuel-efficient cars burn more gasoline to go the same distance, so they generate more wages per mile than more fuel-efficient cars.
So this would mean that the poorer a car’s gas mileage, the better… right? Wrong. Though we’re not here to preach about car choice, we don’t support that logic because it’s trumped by our views on the proper use of carbon offsets, as explained in our FAQ. That FAQ is awaiting your burning questions, by the way!
This all makes for some potentially cryptic and sassy COTAP bumper stickers…
“Wages come out of my tailpipe. COTAP that!”
“My car gets 4.2 CPG. How?! COTAP!”
– Tim
