Carbon dioxide reduction quick tips

Michael Bloch
Carbonify.com
"Global warming - it's our choice"

Buying green tags and carbon offsets is only part of the solution to global warming. We must also reduce the amount of activity that creates excessive carbon dioxide and other greenhouse gases such as methane. Here's a quick series of tips that all of us can implement:

Travel

• Cut out short car trips. Cars release the most emissions when cold. Plan out your shopping so you can make fewer trips to the store each week.
• Remove unnecessary weight from your vehicle; this will cut down fuel consumption and carbon dioxide emissions
• One of the greatest fuel guzzling issues is caused by improper tire inflations.
• Use public transport wherever possible - if public transport is lacking in your area; make some noise with local officials!

Home

• If you don't need it, switch it off at the wall. Appliances running on standby power consume a great deal of energy, unnecessarily.
• Take shorter showers and use the shower instead of the bath (saves a stack of water too!)
• Turn down the heat or air-conditioning a fraction. Do you really need to get around in summer clothes in winter? Even setting your thermostat up or down a degree or two can make a huge difference in electricity consumption.
• Recycle whatever you can. While recycling glass, paper, cans etc. does require energy to reform new products, it's far less than having to mine, drill or harvest the raw resources.

Work/office

• See if you can telecommute (work from home) a day a week. This will save you gas and money and your employers a bit of electricity at the office!
• Talk to your employer about carbon emission reduction strategies e.g. a "lights off when not in use" policy. Approach it not only from the warm and fuzzy environmental viewpoint, but the financial benefits. You never know, you may just get a promotion or a salary raise!

Garden

• Don't burn leaf litter, mulch or compost it instead - burning vegetation spews great volumes of carbon dioxide and other heat trapping pollutants into the atmosphere

Food

• Try to source locally, organically grown fruits and vegetables. Some green produce is shipped thousands of miles in refrigerated trucks before it hits your supermarket
• Cut down a little on red meat - the livestock industry is responsible for millions of tonnes of methane, a greenhouse gas, entering our atmosphere each year.

General purchases

• Before buying anything, ask yourself - "Do I really need this?" Rampant consumerism plays a huge role in carbon emissions as production cycles are for the most part energy intensive and one of the by-products of the cycle is carbon dioxide - not to mention other toxic chemicals. When purchasing, keep "green" close to mind.

Offset

• We can't all buy 100% organically and locally produced items that have been created with renewable energy all the time, so try to purchase green tags to help offset carbon dioxide emissions. Rather than being an exercise in futility, offsets and green tags help provide investment capital for renewable energy programs.