It’s not easy being green.

But in this day and age, what with Al Gore winning a Nobel Peace Prize for his inconvenient truth about global climate change and Brad Pitt zooming around Hollywood in his hybrid car, you almost feel pressured to turn off the tap water while brushing your teeth to save that extra three kilograms of CO2 per year.

Note: The above figure was actually obtained from the online Carbon Calculator, a wonderful tool that estimates just exactly how many kilograms of CO2 you can save each year, giving you “the chance to make a public pledge to reduce your personal carbon footprint.”

But personally, I could care less. Sadly, my wee-sized footprint really makes no difference in the grand scheme of things.

Obviously, the University of Pennsylvania Environmental Group would resent that statement. After all, it did put all that hard work into the Annual Light Bulb Exchange a few weeks ago, busily replacing normal bulbs in students’ residence hall rooms with compact-florescent Lamps that are 75 percent more efficient. PEG also plans to host a “Green Festival,” distribute recycling bins and create a “Guide to Sustainable Living on Campus.”

Matt Nerlinger, a senior in the College and a member of PEG, believes that their environmental-awareness campaigns encourage people to reduce personal energy consumption through conservation practices.

“The harmful impact we’ve felt due to global warming gives us a bigger impetus to fight it, especially since masses of people are still ignorant of the issue,” Nerlinger told me.

“The spread of knowledge will lead to fundamental changes and has the potential to mitigate climate effects,” he added.

While I applaud his dedication and optimistic outlook, such efforts are futile. The minimal benefit that switching light bulbs, for example, generates is doomed to be negated by some external force outside of humanity’s control.

The root of my cynicism can be traced back to not-so-cooperative Mother Nature. Last week, I watched the news in utter astonishment as I learned of the latest wildfires in Southern California and their dire consequences – no, not just the massive economic losses, but rather the alarming environmental damages.

The San Francisco Chronicle reported that the fire has spit out 7.9 million metric tons of carbon dioxide, equivalent to 25 percent of California’s monthly greenhouse gas emission. According to a study by the University of Colorado, such fires can rocket as much CO2 into the atmosphere in a few weeks as a state’s entire motor vehicle traffic in a year.

And lately, such natural disasters have become a common trend, occurring with much greater frequency and magnitude. Horrific memories from the 2003 wildfire still linger on the minds of Southern California residents. Meanwhile, volcanoes are erupting and hurricanes are striking at much faster rates, and the environmental destruction they cause far exceeds any individual or collective attempts to decrease our “carbon footprint.”

I was disheartened. All that carbon I helped saved from years of diligently adjusting the thermostat and recycling water bottles has been offset by random and uncontrollable natural disasters. I might as well have been driving around in a monster SUV everyday.

Professor Gary Bernstein, who teaches Physics 016: “Energy, Oil, and Global Warming,” agreed these massive fires can lead to greater buildup of carbon dioxide than human actions.

However, he pointed out that forest burning often leads to higher re-growth rates of vegetation, which can potentially absorb more carbon dioxide, thus canceling out the damaging effects of the fires. In fact, the carbon content of our Earth has always fluctuated in such a manner.

It may be true that fires can have neutral or even positive long-term effects on the environment, but only if the real estate and logging industries stop interfering with the process (which isn’t going to happen). Deforestation for development and manufacturing purposes is the real underlying issue here. The balanced carbon cycle won’t function if trees aren’t replanted.

According to Bernstein, anyone “who buys IKEA furniture made in Burma” deserves far more blame for contributing to the dismantling of natural forests than those who blast their AC in the summer.

So forget about searching for the ENERGY STAR label when purchasing a new refrigerator. Even if we got all Americans on board with environmentalism, keep in mind that there are developing countries (namely, China) whose soaring economic expansions are intimately tied to copious amounts of fossil-fuel burning.

And they’re not changing their light bulbs anytime soon.

Instead, if you really care about the environment, perhaps you should reconsider your next trip to IKEA.