If you've lived in a cabin with no television or radio for the last ten years you might not have heard about the need to trim your co2 emissions. For everyone who has been living on the planet and ever watches a single hour or tv or read a magazine you know that almost everyone seems to be telling you that the time is now to be doing something about your carbon footprint and a dozen other things you might not really understand when it comes to the environment.
So when it comes to reducing your carbon emissions you might not really know where to start. We'll help you with the basics and then give you a few interesting tidbits to chew on that might just help you feel a whole lot better about the process. You can't save the environment all by yourself. It is not individuals that create widespread pollution. Rather, it is the effects of thousands or even millions of folks all lumped together that lead to problems.
co2 emissions An example would be good at this point. A hundred years ago the average family used a completely renewable outhouse waste disposal system. They composted and used their gray water on the pesticide free garden where they grew most of their own food. And that includes the meat they ate, in the form of cows and ducks and pigs and chickens that wandered around the property doing their part in being natural as only animals can be. No one really had cars or lawn mowers and the environment could absorb every atom of co2 emissions produced by each family unit with no problem whatsoever.
Fast forward to now. You probably live in a neighborhood with hundreds of other houses all bunched up together a hundred miles from the nearest forest. Everyone has the average 1.5 cars in the garage and doesn't know what an asparagus in a garden would even look like, much less how to grow it themselves. There are three televisions in the house, along with dozens of other appliances sucking up electricity and the air conditioner and heater are working 24/7/365.
Now, all those conveniences aren't evil by themselves. It's that the cumulative effect of hundreds of thousands of people in every city in a country using all that energy adds up to a huge carbon footprint made up of all those little footprints put together. And you really can't lay all of the responsibility on the companies that produce all that energy for people to consume.
It's not easy to make electricity for a city the size of Dallas. And those vehicles have to be put together from a huge pile of metal and plastics. And all those materials have to be made by digging ore and petroleum products out of the ground and then turned into all those useful bits. Electric cars sound great, but the car is still constructed from things that will cause their own level of co2 emissions.
It's obvious at this point how massive the changes have been over the last 100 years. It might also be dawning on you that energy consumption on the individual level has a bigger impact on how industry effects the environment than just looking at the companies themselves. It's definitely a lot different around your town than it was in 1902.
As a matter of fact, industry has been doing a lot of things to reduce their co2 emissions over the last twenty years, but unfortunately serving the needs of millions of people means that they are trying to manage parts of a million carbon footprints all in one place, and there are only so many ways to cut back and still be able to produce the electricity and fuels that a modern society needs.
So those same people who preach an awful lot about the big bad wolf of oil companies and big industry are merely misplacing much of the blame. The fact is that the lifestyles and energy demands of hundreds of millions of people are the real culprit. Without cars there simply wouldn't be big oil. Without modern appliances there simply wouldn't be a need for all that electrical production.
