First-Hand Proof of a World-Wide Problem

Some pictures from our trip to the Botanical Garden today.

The Visitors' Center said that it was supposed to look like this:
But it looked like this:

Coincidentally enough, I finally watched An Inconvenient Truth this week. As if I wasn't weirded out enough by the crazy weather, I now am completely paranoid about our planet quite literally coming apart at the seams.

I went to the http://www.climatecrisis.net/ website and calculated my carbon impact. It turns out that because I do not own a car and share utilities with my whole building, my impact is pretty low- about 2.0 tons a year. Until I figured in my three cross-country plane trips each year. They made my impact jump up to over 5 tons a year. That's right. In six days of travelling each year I more that double my carbon impact. I had no idea! I'm not sure what I can do about bringing this down other than not flying home more than once a year, but fortunately there are lots of great tips for little things that we can do to help compensate for the necessary evils of using fuel to get ourselves around. I picked some out that those of us who don't drive or have much control over our thermostats and utility usage to share. Visit the website for energy efficient ideas you might talk to your landlord about.

• Replace a regular incandescent light bulb with a compact fluorescent light bulb (cfl). CFLs use 60% less energy than a regular bulb. This simple switch will save about 300 pounds of carbon dioxide a year. If every family in the U.S. made the switch, we’d reduce carbon dioxide by more than 90 billion pounds!
• Use less hot water. It takes a lot of energy to heat water. You can use less hot water by installing a low flow showerhead (350 pounds of carbon dioxide saved per year) and washing your clothes in cold or warm water (500 pounds saved per year) instead of hot.
• Turn off electronic devices you’re not using. Simply turning off your television, DVD player, stereo, and computer when you’re not using them will save you thousands of pounds of carbon dioxide a year.
• Unplug electronics from the wall when you’re not using them. Even when turned off, things like hairdryers, cell phone chargers and televisions use energy. In fact, the energy used to keep display clocks lit and memory chips working accounts for 5 percent of total domestic energy consumption and spews 18 million tons of carbon into the atmosphere every year!
• Be sure you’re recycling at home. You can save 2,400 pounds of carbon dioxide a year by recycling half of the waste your household generates.
• Buy recycled paper products. It takes less 70 to 90% less energy to make recycled paper and it prevents the loss of forests worldwide.
• Buy locally grown and produced foods. The average meal in the United States travels 1,200 miles from the farm to your plate. Buying locally will save fuel and keep money in your community
• Buy fresh foods instead of frozen. Frozen food uses 10 times more energy to produce.
• Buy organic foods as much as possible. Organic soils capture and store carbon dioxide at much higher levels than soils from conventional farms. If we grew all of our corn and soybeans organically, we’d remove 580 billion pounds of carbon dioxide from the atmosphere!
• Avoid heavily packaged products. You can save 1,200 pounds of carbon dioxide if you cut down your garbage by 10%.
• Eat less meat. Methane is the second most significant greenhouse gas and cows are one of the greatest methane emitters. Their grassy diet and multiple stomachs cause them to produce methane, which they exhale with every breath.

Come on, people!!! Let's get this going! I got a new puffy coat that I'd actually like to wear sometime this year!

One of the most exciting parts of An Inconvenient Truth was how the levels of CFC's have gone down in the last ten years and the depletion of the ozone layer has begun to be reversed. Because people made changes and our government legislated the necessary regulations. So there is still hope for us. We need to not only change our own habits but write letters and make phone calls so that our new congress knows we're serious about making real change in the way we're impacting our planet.