So "carbon neutral" has just been named the New Oxford American Dictionary's Word of the Year for 2006!

Carbon neutral essentially involves calculating your total climate-damaging carbon emissions, reducing them where you can and then balancing your remaining carbon emissions wherever possible by planting trees or investing in "green" technologies.

You can start balancing your carbon emissions with your car.

While it can all get a little complicated, you can roughly estimate your vehicles carbon emissions on this basic rule of thumb - the lower the fuel economy, the more carbon dioxide the car emits. So if you're driving a Prius chances are you're going to have to plant a whole lot less tress than the average Hummer driver.

If you really want to do your bit check out the Forbes list of the greenest cars on the market.

Check out the other words/phrases that carbon neutral was up against this year - my personal favourite is definitely "Ghostriding" - the practice of exiting a moving vehicle and dancing either beside it, or on the hood or roof, while the vehicle is in motion.

Erin McKean, editor in chief of the New Oxford American Dictionary, said "The increasing use of the word carbon neutral reflects not just the greening of our culture, but the greening of our language. When you see first graders trying to make their classrooms carbon neutral, you know the word has become mainstream."

2005’s word of the year was “Podcast” and we just need to take a moment to think about how this concept moved from geek domain to mainstream in such a short time. I hope that this response will ring true for “carbon neutral”.