David did an awfully good job of keeping you guys posted while we met and greeted visitors to our booth at the Chicago Greenfest. While we all took time out to see speakers and meet with other green business people, a major part of our time over the weekend involved asking people to use the carbon calculator we had available to figure up the CO2 emissions they created by traveling to the event.

Why would people do that? So we could offset those emissions, of course.

Turns out that offering free offsets (specifically wind energy credits provided by Renewable Choice Energy, a company Shea helped found) worked pretty well as a draw: we had hundreds of people visit, and their emissions tallied up to almost 74,000 pounds. As we told people visiting the booth, their travel was the biggest source of CO2 emissions for the event — GreenFest itself offset the electricity used at Chicago's McCormick Center, and that came in at over 17,000 pounds. Needless to say, we were happy to help neutralize some of the carbon footprint of Greenfest…

We also got some great photos. Super-intern Liam handled most of the photo duties for us, and we'll get some of those posted. In the meantime, here's one that appeared on Treehugger yesterday: the cute woman on the left is Leonora Oppenheim, one of my compadres at Treehugger. The guy who looks like a well-fed English professor with thinning hair… OK, that's me… We're standing in the festival's Fair Trade Pavilion, right in front of the Kallari Association's booth. The Fair Trade chocolate they were promoting was incredible — David got a whole bag of it…

Needless to say, we had a great time — we hope those of you who attended will share your stories.