May 17 - McClatchy-Tribune Regional News - Jeff Sturgeon The Roanoke Times, Va.

By making simple calculations based on old utility bills, gasoline purchases and recycling practices, a community, business, group or individual can figure its carbon footprint, or total contribution to the forces of global warming.

Then, it's time to substitute greenhouse gas-emitting practices for more benign ones, such as hanging laundry instead of running the dryer, bicycling rather than driving, burning energy efficient light bulbs and supporting tree farms and wind power.

This comes from the Roanoke Valley Cool Cities Coalition, an affiliation of 100 companies, governments, people and organizations crusading against global warming.

The group is bustling with grass-roots energy in major population centers of Western Virginia to forestall climate change, with its risk of sea-level rise in catastrophic proportions.

"We are not saving the planet. We are saving ourselves," Diana Christopulos, chair of the board of the coalition, told a carbon-footprint workshop Friday.

Carbon foot-printing is a way of estimating the impact of human activities on the environment expressed in tons of carbon dioxide gas released into the atmosphere yearly. That includes direct releases from operating a motor vehicle that burns gasoline and indirect releases from using electricity generated by coal-fired power plants. Recycling figures in, too. The coalition has designed a carbon footprint calculator for Southwest Virginia that is available free on its Web site.

More than 50 people representing a diverse group of businesses and organizations showed up at the workshop to see how it works. The coalition is recommending that after groups and individuals calculate how many pounds of climate-warming greenhouse gases they are sending into the atmosphere, they take responsibility to make it smaller.

The coalition says it can help with strategies, which include investing in clean technologies such as wind energy and carbon-gobbling programs such as tree farms.

The time is now, according to speakers. And everyone can help because the typical two-person household has a carbon footprint of about 20 tons of carbon dioxide put into the environment a year.

Christopulos said that businesses not already voluntarily curbing their practices that accelerate global warming "are at a lot of risk" if mandatory greenhouse gas emission limits come out. But businesses are stepping up, she said, noting Wal-Mart cut its in-store energy use 20 percent and devoted premium shelf space to compact fluorescent light bulbs.

In the region, Roanoke Cement, in addition to its own facility improvements, is planning to defray the cost of several local governments measuring and studying their greenhouse gas footprint. Hollins University, with a carbon footprint of 18,086 tons during the 2006-07 year, plans by next year to chart a course to become carbon neutral. Breakell Inc. general contractors in Roanoke, with a carbon footprint of 141 tons, is using high-efficiency vehicles and lending support to the wider cause.

"I can make a pretty powerful business case for green," said Stan Breakell, the company's president and a coalition board member.

But the participation of scores of average citizens is key to success, Breakell said. For instance, the city of Roanoke is working hard to shrink the carbon footprint of its municipal operations, which has fallen by slightly since 2005 and stands at about 50,000 tons. But those operations represent just a fraction of the entire community's carbon footprint of 2.9 million tons, said Sean McGinnis, director of the Green Engineering Program at Virginia Tech.

"Unless everybody gets on board, a big piece of the solution will be left out," he said.