“We think a lot about our carbon footprint,” says Deborah Markowitz. She diligently recycles, avoids eating meat most days, burns wood pellets for heat, and drives an electric car if public transport isn’t available. That’s all pretty standard fare for the environmentally conscious. But last week she did something that even the greenest of people rarely do. When Markowitz, a professor of environmental policy at the University of Vermont, traveled with her husband to Washington,