How to reduce your ‘carbon footprint’ and make a difference to our environment

Image by sub­ur­ban­bloke

About a week ago I cre­ated a ‘fun quizz’ to assess your level of envi­ron­men­tal lit­er­acy. Today we will focus on a few things you can do to con­tribute in the reduc­tion of car­bon emis­sions. Before we get started, let’s see why this is a worth­while goal.
The cause for reduc­ing car­bon emis­sions: Cli­mate change

Accord­ing to ‘Nature Mag­a­zine’, a promi­nent & well respected sci­en­tific pub­li­ca­tion, “cli­mate change is caused by the emis­sion of heat-trapping gases – mostly car­bon diox­ide (CO₂) – from vehi­cles, indus­try, power plants and defor­esta­tion. As these gases build up, they act like a thick blan­ket, over­heat­ing the planet, chang­ing our cli­mate, and threat­en­ing our health, econ­omy and nat­ural envi­ron­ment.” (see full arti­cle here). The threats they talk about are not imag­i­nary: We have all started to live through the impact of some of these. Have you noticed an increase in the num­ber and vio­lence of nat­ural dis­as­ters in the last few years? So have many oth­ers, and the link to Cli­mate Change has been clearly established .

If you’re A NIM­BYer who thinks that cli­mate change won’t impact you, think again (NIMBY: Not-In-My-Back-yard). Earth’s cli­mate sys­tem is global, and the changes are far-reaching. C’mon — you say — surely this will affect only polar bears and peo­ple in poor coun­tries, right? Wrong. Some of the expected impacts of cli­mate change include:

• Tem­per­a­tures will rise. You may have noticed that every sum­mer seems to get hot­ter. It is not your imag­i­na­tion; and the impact is far more sig­nif­i­cant than sim­ply need­ing to cool your­self a lit­tle bit more every day. Ris­ing tem­per­a­tures can have sig­nif­i­cant dis­rup­tions in agri­cul­ture (food avail­abil­ity & prices), ris­ing storm activ­ity (remem­ber Kat­rina?), and increase in heat-related ill­nesses (malaria & heat-stroke, among others)
• More species of wildlife will either become extinct, or be threat­ened to extinc­tion. A recent report high­lighted that a quar­ter of exist­ing species in our planet will become extinct by 2050 if we don’t change cur­rent lev­els of car­bon emis­sions. If this hap­pened, it would impact a lot more than sim­ply he num­ber of ani­mals you can visit at your local zoo. Reduced bio­di­ver­sity will affect our planet in ways we can not even imag­ine. For exam­ple, some pests that are con­trolled by nat­ural preda­tors may be able to roam more freely and have a sig­nif­i­cant impact in our food supplies.
• Ocean lev­els will rise. This may not seem too dras­tic or impor­tant to you; but do you realise that over 70% of human activ­ity hap­pens by coastal areas? A rise in the sea lev­els of a meter will wipe out a good por­tion of our civilised world. Just in Aus­tralia, over 700,000 build­ings have been esti­mated as being at risk of the effects of ris­ing sea lev­els (The 7:30 Report, ABC. Full tran­script of the pro­gram can be found here). Sim­i­lar esti­mates exist for North & South Amer­ica, Europe, Asia and Africa. The real­ity is that ocean-views have long been con­sid­ered by humans as a highly desir­able fea­ture of their liv­ing habi­tat, and this has in turn influ­enced the way we built our cities.

I’m con­vinced, but can I really do any­thing to make things better?

The good news is that it doesn’t take deep pock­ets or a Uni­ver­sity diploma to become more car­ing to the envi­ron­ment in this regard. Almost every aspect of your every­day life has an impact on the CO2 emis­sions that are put into the atmos­phere, and most of the time we are totally igno­rant to this fact. The time to change that has come!

Before we get to the ‘how to’, you may want to have a real­ity check about what your spe­cific impact to the envi­ron­ment is with regards to car­bon emis­sions. I sug­gest you go to Nature Magazine’s ‘Car­bon Foot­print’ cal­cu­la­tor, and assess your­self. (Cal­cu­la­tor can be found here) When you’re ready, come back and learn how you can reduce your cur­rent footprint.

Gone and back? Let’s move on to the “juicy bit” of this arti­cle: How To reduce your car­bon foot­print. Below are five sim­ple sug­ges­tions that you can eas­ily turn into habits. All you have to do is put them into prac­tice for a whole month. As Steve Pavlina illus­trates in his blog, prac­tic­ing any­thing for 30 days on a row will turn any prac­tice into a well estab­lished habit. Go crazy!

1. Develop the habit of liv­ing in darkness

How many lights do you typ­i­cally have turned on at night through­out your house? If you’re like most peo­ple, you will have too many — your bed­room, your liv­ing area, your kitchen, your bath­room, your garage. Just think whether you really need all of them on at the same time. Do you?

In case you answered ‘Yes’, let;s exam­ine a simpe exam­ple and see if your answer remains vaid. I’d like you to think about the time you spent cook­ing and hav­ing din­ner yes­ter­day (prob­a­bly 20 to 60 min­utes). How many of the other rooms did you go to dur­ing this time period? Even if you did go to another room, for how long did you stay before you returned to the kitchen or din­ing area? Obvi­ously, you need to con­sider other mem­bers of the fam­ily, but you can apply the same logic to their activ­i­ties. My guess is that there were var­i­ous areas of the house that remained lit with­out a real need for it.

Learn to ‘live in dark­ness’ — or at least in semi-darkness. Turn lights on as you need them, and get into the habit of turn­ing them off as you leave the room. Wor­ried that this will shorten the life of light­bulbs, and hurt your pocket? Change your light bulbs for the envi­ron­men­tally friendly type and you will pro­long their life. In the process, you will also put some addi­tional money in your pocket from both the increase in the life of light bulbs (less money spent over a year in light bulb), and from the reduc­tion in elec­tric­ity con­sump­tion (lower elec­tric­ity bills).

2. Have shorter, colder showers

We west­ern­ers have devel­oped the habit of stay­ing under a hot, steam­ing shower for far longer than we need to. Unfor­tu­nately, this prac­tice neg­a­tively and unnec­es­sar­ily impacts our level of car­bon emmi­sions. Heat­ing water requires burn­ing of a fuel (either gas at your hot-water tank, or car­bon at the power elec­tric­ity plant), which cre­ates CO2 emis­sions of Either way, your hot shower cre­ates green-house emissions.

TO change this habit, you don’t need to freeze in the shower every morn­ing. One way to improve the sit­u­a­tion is to change the way you cal­i­brate your shower’s tem­per­a­ture. Instead of blast­ing the hot water until it’s boil­ing and then gen­tly open­ing the cold water to arrive to the desired tem­per­a­ture, try to do it the other way around. Turn the shower on by first open­ing the cold-water tap, then slowly heat­ing it by turn­ing the hot-water tap. Stop at the first moment the tem­per­a­ture is com­fort­able. And stay in the shower for no more than 3 minutes.

If you are like me, you will also live in a city where there are water restric­tions. Adopt­ing the habit of colder, shorter show­ers will not only reduce car­bon emis­sions , it will also con­tribute to sav­ing on your water consumption.

3. Use pub­lic trans­port to get to work

The major­ity of peo­ple pre­fer to drive to work rather than tak­ing a bus or the train. It usu­ally has to do with con­trol: There’s a per­cep­tion that when tak­ing the bus & Train you are too depen­dent on oth­ers to arrive to work on time. And there’s always the risk of not hav­ing a seat and being incon­ve­nienced by hav­ing to stand through­out the trip. The ulti­mate excuse, how­ever, is that most peo­ple are not within walk­ing dis­tance to their near­est train sta­tion / bus stop, whereas our cars are usu­ally garaged a few steps from our doorsteps.

If you share at least some of these rea­sons, you may want to think again. Wor­ried about a trip stand­ing on a bus? Buy your­self a cheap MP3 player, down­load some inter­est­ing pod­casts, and do some stretches on your trip. You will not only save on petrol and park­ing, but you will edu­cate your­self and improve your health.

Sim­i­larly, not being near a train sta­tion or bus stop is not a good excuse to drive to work every day. You can always drive a short dis­tance to a sta­tion or bus stop, park there for the whole day (usu­ally for free), and enjoy a stress-free ride.

Make the change. Find out alter­na­tive pub­lic trans­port and save, avoid the stress of peak-hoir traf­fic, and help the environment.

4. Assess energy-efficiency when pur­chas­ing appliances

There are 2 ways in which you can help the envi­ron­ment when it comes to energy effi­cient appli­ances: the cheaper way and the more expen­sive way.

The more expen­sive way is to iden­tify your ‘worst offend­ers’ at home, and imme­di­ately replace them with appli­ances that are at the top of the energy effi­ciency scale. Make sure you do your research before you hit the foot­path and head­ing to the shops. There is a col­lec­tion of links at the end of this arti­cle sug­gest­ing where to go to research appli­ances and get an idea of their energy efficiency.

The less expen­sive way is to do the same but only when an appli­ance breaks down and requires replac­ing. Don’t be fooled by think­ing that you will spend more money with energy effi­cient goods: In the long run, they will save you a bucket of cash from the lower elec­tric­ity bill, even if they require a slightly higher cash outlay.

5.Minimise your reliance on heaters and air-conditionings

It is absolutely evi­dent that heaters and A/C units are ultra-convenient: If you don’t like the cur­rent tem­per­a­ture at home, all you need to do is crank up or down the ther­mo­stat of your cho­sen cli­mate con­trol appliance.

The prob­lem with these is that they have trained us to chase the ‘per­fect’ tem­per­a­ture at home. In the process, you close your home shut to avoid heat or cold escap­ing. But have you ever stopped to con­sider if it is hot enough to war­rant use of the air con­di­tioner? Or whether it is cold enough to turn the heater?

Before our homes were ‘enhanced’ with these appli­ances, we relied on other means to adjust our tem­per­a­ture at home. Too hot? Open the win­dows and let the breeze in. Too cold? Go to your closet and pull a nice, warm jumper. Too cold in the mid­dle of the night? Invest in a good doona, and you will never again need the heater on.

Stop wast­ing elec­tric­ity and your money. Start exer­cis­ing some dis­cre­tion when you decide to touch the heater or A/C at home. Even bet­ter — put a note on the con­trols to remind you to ‘THINK BEFORE TOUCHING’, or hide the remote con­trols to these appli­ances. Hav­ing to walk to the unit itself should help you remem­ber to think twice about whether using it is really nec­es­sary.

Make a dif­fer­ence start­ing today!

We have just given you 5 ideas on how to reduce your carbon-emissions foot­print in the planet. Choose one, and start today. Once you turn it into a habit, choose the next one, and apply for a while month. It will take you less than half a year to adjust your habits and make a real dif­fer­ence to the environment.

Don’t like our ideas? Look for some oth­ers’ in the web. The resources sec­tion below has plenty of web sites with lit­er­ally hun­dreds of ideas to help us in the jour­ney to a more sus­tain­able lifestyle.
Links & Ref­er­ences

Nature Mag­a­zine: www.nature.org
Steve Pavlina’s web site:www.stevepavlina.com

CO2 Foot­print cal­cu­la­tor: www.nature.org/initiatives/climatechange/calculator
Arti­cle on cli­mate change: www.nature.org/initiatives/climatechange
ABC Arti­cle on sea level rise: www.abc.net.au/7.30/content/2007/s1869888.htm
Turn­ing prac­tices into habits: www.stevepavlina.com/blog/2005/04/30-days-to-success

Addi­tional Resources

Read­ing Energy Labels: www.energyrating.gov.au
Choos­ing energy effi­cient prod­ucts: www.buyenergyefficient.org/buy.html
Choice Mag­a­zine: www.choice.com.au

Tagged as: 30, 56, 6, 62, 73, 75, 79, 80, 92, 98