It is really cool that we now know the carbon footprint of a 64-ounce container of Tropicana Pure Premium Orange Juice.  Clearly, you need to know the carbon impact of a product before you can credibly claim to reduce its impact.

The fun part for me is thinking about who is responsible for these emissions.

Clearly, as a consumer, I can make the choice to avoid this product, thereby reducing my personal footprint. You could argue that the folks at Tropicana would figure out how to sell it to someone else and so that wouldn’t really reduce emissions, but just transfer the responsibility for them from me to the other consumer. 

Or are these emissions solely the responsibility of Tropicana (or its parent Pepsico)? I figure, if they didn’t make it, I couldn’t buy it and there would be no emissions associated with the product.

Now I love orange juice as much as the next guy (actually I prefer grapefruit juice), which I’m sure has a similar footprint. I don’t drink it very often, but that’s not the point. I’m all for juice. I just think it is an interesting little brain teaser to think about where responsibility for all these carbon emissions truly lies. The hard question is: what are we going to do about it?