One of the reasons for the recent silence here in the Vertography blog has been a short trip we took back home to the UK. While there, we also took a side trip down to the beautiful city of Venice, in Italy, for a few days. As a result, we booked two return flights: one between San Francisco and London, and one between London and Venice.

When booking the trans-Atlantic flight, on United Airlines, we were offered the choice to pay for upgrades and given links to partners for booking cars and hotels, but nothing more. When we booked the Venice flights with EasyJet, a UK based low cost carrier, right there on the booking page, in addition to other offers, we were offered the option to buy carbon offsets for our flight.

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Over at eRedux you can take a look at the carbon output of each state in the US and compare them. If you click through in to the detail for any state you will get detailed information about each state.

The top two states in terms of absolute carbon output are Texas (670 million tons) and California (389 million tons), but the per-capita numbers are very different with Texans producing almost 3 times as much CO2 as Californians.

Top 5 & Bottom 5 States
This section of the chart shows the best 5 states in terms of per capita carbon output:

And this one shows the five worst performing states in terms of per capita carbon output:

In what is perhaps the strangest article I remember reading in the UK Telegraph, it seems that Argentine scientists have been looking into the methane gas produced by cattle.

The Telegraph article claims the researchers at the Argentine National Institute of Agricultural Technology estimate that every cow produces 800-1000 litres of emissions every day. With 55 million heads of cattle grazing in Argentina, these emissions could amount to as much as 30% of the countries greenhouse gas emissions (and methane is 23 times worse than CO2 when it comes to trapping heat).