As published in the Lafayette Today newspaper.
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January is a popular time to make resolutions for the New Year. To help combat global warming, you may want to consider including a resolution to reduce your family’s “carbon footprint” by a certain percentage or number of pounds. Imagine the impact of hundred of thousands of people doing this across the country. It all adds up!
Your carbon footprint is a representation of the effect you, or your family, have on the climate in terms of the total amount of greenhouse gases you produce (measured in units of carbon dioxide). Many of your actions—such as driving a car--generate carbon emissions, which contribute to accelerating global warming and climate change. The average American is responsible for about 20 tons of carbon dioxide emissions each year, a far greater per capita number than that of any other industrialized country.
By measuring your carbon footprint with a carbon footprint calculator, you can get a better sense of what your individual or family impact is and which parts of your lifestyle deserve the greatest attention. A carbon footprint calculator asks simple questions to estimate CO2 emissions for home energy use and transportation. Some also include questions about waste handling and food choices. Ideally, footprint calculators would also try to calculate the emissions from producing and transporting all the products and services we consume, but that is hard to measure. There are many good carbon calculators available on the Internet. A couple of our favorites are offered by the Nature Conservancy and the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA):
http://www.nature.org/initiatives/climatechange/calculator/
http://epa.gov/climatechange/emissions/ind_calculator.html
Climatecrisis.net, safeclimate.net, and earthlab.com also provide good calculators.
Set a Goal
The next step is to set a goal for reducing your carbon footprint that you can achieve during 2008. You might choose to reduce your overall footprint by 10 or 20% or try to reduce your carbon footprint by 5000 pounds. Pick a goal that you can be proud of but that is also achievable.
Identify Actions
Armed with the information provided by a good carbon footprint calculator you can more readily identify areas for improvement and specific actions to shrink your footprint. There are a zillion tips on the Internet for reducing your impact. One site that gives you dollar and carbon savings for each action you take is offered by stopglobalwarming.org:
http://www.stopglobalwarming.org/carboncalculator.asp
For instance, by replacing three frequently used light bulbs with compact fluorescents you can save $60 and 300 pounds of CO2 per year.
For more ideas on how to reduce your carbon footprint, please visit www.sustainablelafayette.net. Sustainable Lafayette offers many success stories of actions taken by your neighbors and will be offering a Low Carbon Diet workshop soon (see web site for details).
link to PDF of Lafayette Today that
included article on page 14