My Mile Marker Tracks Your MPG

I don’t personally own a car, but in a few weeks I’ll be going on a two-week-long, 5,500-mile road trip to the west coast via the empty interior.

No, I won’t be on a bike — my cousin, Matthia, and I will be driving his car, and I’ll be blogging the entire trip so you guys can travel vicariously through me on this marathon road trip. Since my cousin and I will be splitting the cost of gas, I need to keep meticulous records (something I’m horrible at) of each fill up. I plan on writing down the pertinent information (price per gallon, number of gallons purchased, number of miles since last stop, etc.) and calculating the numbers when I return home. However, I just found about a new (free) website called My Mile Marker which allows you to enter all of this information into their system, and it’ll produce charts, graphs, and evaluate your fuel economy. Best of all, you can update from the road with your cell phone!

Unfortunately I don’t have any data to plug into the system to test it out, but I will after my upcoming road trip. In the mean time, if anyone wants to run their numbers through My Mile Marker, drop us a line and let us know how it works. [via]

Flying Green

It’s been on my mind lately. How much harm are we doing to the environment, flying around in fuel-guzzling jumbo jets? Being a large city dweller, I haven’t owned a car for years. However, I’ll jet around any chance I get.

On a per-passenger basis, flying is still less damaging than driving. (Here’s a nifty carbon calculator to see how much CO2 your next flight will generate.) However, airplanes do burn a lot of fuel and generally push pollutants up higher in the atmosphere than cars (the effects of which are being debated).

Fortunately, there is some hope for the guilty-minded. Some companies are offering the ability to pay for carbon-sequestering, sometimes by paying to have trees planted to offset carbon emissions, including Myclimate.org and TerraPass. Information about these programs is available on the web, including recent articles in the NY Times and Wired, and MyClimate’s site carbonoffsets.org.

Expedia, apparently, now offers to sell you offsets directly, charging $5.99 per 1,000 pounds of CO2, or about the amount from a 2,200 mile flight.