Guilt

Here I am in the vicinity of Seattle, the town that calls itself the Emerald City, the town whose mayor created the US Mayors' Climate Protection Agreement. I moved up here to work at Microsoft, a company that has purchased enough white Priuses to comprise most of its large campus shuttle fleet. Also, the tableware in Microsoft's 24 on-site cafeterias is made of vegetable products, designed to be composted, and there are compost bins in every break room and conference hall as well as the cafeterias themselves. It has its own private bus service, supports an on-campus bicycle maintenance event . . . I could go on. Whether any of this resulted from employees acting in their role as stockholders, rather than just leaving large numbers of identical comments in a suggestion box somewhere, I don't know--but it all seems very hopeful, especially when compared with the execrable environmental records of so many other massively powerful corporations.

But here I am, making a ten-mile commute every day from temporary housing on Mercer Island, alone in a rented SUV. To be fair to myself, I asked for a compact, but apparently all the Sea-Tac Avis had on hand was a Hyundai Santa Fe (amusing name for a Korean car, though no more so than the Toyota Tacoma if you think about it). But if I wanted to, I could take two buses and little more than an hour each way--yet I can't make myself accept the inconvenience. It's sad, really.

I'll be returning the vehicle next Monday or Tuesday, then riding back from the airport to my new apartment on a couple of express buses, and probably going back to my previous habit of biking to work, this time from a full two miles away instead of one and a bit. So all told, that's maybe three and a half weeks of being environmentally irresponsible (and probably over $100 of gasoline, which may not be expensable under the otherwise generous Microsoft relocation package). But I'll probably still buy some extra carbon credits this month, just to make me feel a little better about it.