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"Some people have decided that the way to help fight global
warming is to
put their daily consumption of energy on a strict diet".

http://www.time.com/time/health/article/0,8599,1552237,00.html?cnn=yes

Science & Health
The Low Carbon Diet
By STACIE STUKIN/LOS ANGELES
Posted Monday, Oct. 30, 2006

Kay Spencer has always been conservation minded. But this
summer, after she
saw the Al Gore global warming documentary An Inconvenient
Truth, she was
left with an overwhelming sense of doom. "I thought, now
what? What else can
I do?"

Whatever she might have imagined, it's a safe bet it didn't
include going on
a diet. But that was before she went to the movie's website
(www.climatecrisis.net) and discovered a calculator where
she could
determine her carbon footprint - a measurement of how many
pounds of
global-warming-causing carbon dioxide she and her family
were emitting
annually into the atmosphere from their daily lives - energy
they used to
power their home, to get around and the energy used to make
all the products
they consumed. Then she began to figure out ways they could
cut back on
their emissions.

"I realized how easy it was to do some really simple things
that had a real
impact," says Spencer, who lives in Santa Cruz county in
California with her
husband and their 16 year-old daughter.

For years, governments and corporations have been balancing
out their
emissions by participating in carbon-offsetting - the
practice in which they
invest in renewable energy to compensate for the
global-warming pollution
they produce. Now, a small but growing number of individuals
are trying
their hand at something similar, tightening their own
personal pollution
belts by going on so-called low carbon diets.

According to the U.S. Department of Energy the average
person emits about 20
tons - or roughly 40,000 pounds - of carbon dioxide a year.
That number
includes how much they use personally in their home and for
their
transportation (about 16,000 pounds), as well as the
emissions caused by the
products they consume (about 24,000 pounds). That is far
above the
international average of about 4 tons per capita, which
makes America the
top five carbon dioxide polluter on the planet.

... A new study even suggests that a traditional diet may be
good for a
carbon diet; the report, to be published this month in The
Engineering
Economist suggests that people who are overweight burn more
gas when they
drive. But whether it's low carb or a low carbon, all diets
have one thing
in common: they only succeed long term if people find a way
to maintain the
healthier habits past the initial burst of enthusiastic good
behavior.