Bali: It's About Time

The world's environmental elite are flying into Bali -- for most of them, half way around the world -- to save the planet. And no, they're not flapping their arms to get there, they're using honking big gas-guzzling jet airplanes. Someone's going to have to reduce their carbon footprint to compensate for the size 16 footprint left by Bali. Maybe Bally, India will be asked to reduce its carbon footprint to zero. Sounds like a good offset.

But what, you may ask, is Richard Bali-Ball doing to reduce his carbon footprint?

Just this.

I was so alarmed by the drowning polar bear photos in Time magazine that I am letting my long-term subscription lapse. That's right. I am giving up my Time magazine to save the planet -- the magazine that consumes energy to make the paper and then more energy to be trucked across the Eastern seaboard until it finally lands in my mailbox in PEI.

There'll soon be no more Time Magazine with Richard Ball of PEI's name on it. No sir-ee.

It's just a little something I can do.

I know Time magazine will be proud of me and glad to know its crusade to get people to cut back is paying off.

Curiously, however, rather than applauding my non-renewal, they keep inundating me with subscription offers, adding ever-greater enticements to renew (I think the last offer included a condo in Florida if I would renew for three years.)

So they're expanding their footprint while I'm reducing mine.

Maybe that's what the green crowd really means by carbon offsetting.

And that's the way the ever-so-slightly smaller Ball of C02 bounces -- to Bali and back.