
PepsiCo, feeling the (ever warmer) winds of change ruffle its hair, has decided to be proactive in measuring its own carbon emissions. Its test case is orange juice - how much does a glass of Tropicana contribute to global warming?
The company hired experts to measure emissions in every part of the orange juice-making process: Fertilizing the field, transporting orange cartons, running the factory. Turns out, growing is the single biggest source of emissions, as the nitrogen fertilizer used on citrus groves needs a lot of natural gas to make, and turns into a greenhouse gas when spread on the fields.
The final number? About 3.75 pounds of carbon dioxide are emitted for each half-gallon carton of orange juice.
While that statistic is fairly meaningless without any context, the fact that PepsiCo is calculating its carbon emissions means that other corporations are likely to follow in its footsteps. And as emissions numbers become more widely known, consumers will be able to choose to buy products from companies that make a concentrated effort to reduce their footprints.Check out the original New York Times article for a slideshow on tracking the carbon footprint of the orange.
If you were planning to break the records and live well into your 100's, you might want to rethink that plan. 
We're in the thick of the maple syrup harvest season right now, but high fuel costs will likely lead to price increases of around 30 percent, according to an article in the
I haven't seen An Inconvenient Truth yet, so I don't know if Al Gore covers this, but it looks like one of the biggest contributors to global warming is the food we eat and the processes that give us that food.










