Jul 17 2006
It’s Just a Cycle….
A recent AP story states: “The federal government reported last week that the first half of 2006 was the warmest in the United States since record keeping began in 1895. The average temperature for the 48 contiguous United States from January through June was 51.8 degrees, or 3.4 degrees above average for the 20th century.”
It’s easy to be lazy and say, “this is just a weather cycle.” I’m sitting in a place where the temperature has been over 100 for a week, and I believe otherwise. Warmer air means warmer water, which means stronger hurricanes, more tornados, and melting ice caps. If we each make the effort to do some simple things in our lives, if we take the time to let our representatives know they need to take action, we can all make an impact. Aside from buying a hyrbrid vehicle, riding a bike, or walking to nearby destinations, I’ll drop the dime on ten things you can do at home to reduce your impact on the planet. Click here for more details.
1. 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.
2. Move your thermostat down 2° in winter and up 2° in summer. You could save about 2,000 pounds of carbon dioxide a year with this simple adjustment.
3. Clean or replace filters on your furnace and air conditioner. Cleaning a dirty air filter can save 350 pounds of carbon dioxide a year.
4. Choose energy efficient appliances when making new purchases. If each household in the U.S. replaced its existing appliances with the most efficient models available, we’d eliminate 175 million tons of carbon dioxide emissions every year!
5. Wrap your water heater in an insulation blanket. You’ll save 1,000 pounds of carbon dioxide a year with this simple action.
6. Use less hot 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.
7. Use a clothesline instead of a dryer whenever possible. You can save 700 pounds of carbon dioxide when you air dry your clothes for 6 months out of the year.
8. 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.
9. Unplug electronics from the wall when you’re not using them. 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!
10. 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.
love these ideas – all so doable! for christmas this past year, we gave tons of our family cfl bulbs in addition to their other gifts with a note describing the benefits…we hoped we could magnify the effect for good if multiple households participated with us. -m-
It is easy, Melanie, and almost all of these things will save people money! I wish saving the environment could be less a Democrat/Republican issue, and more of what it truly is — a moral issue about saving our planet and providing a safe, clean comfortable world for our kids and grandkids to enjoy. Thanks for your post, and keep handing out those bulbs! What a great idea!
Listening to a radio show called “Which Way L.A.?” on KCRW yesterday, I heard a climatoligist for the Jet Propulsion Lab say that of the three degrees warmer than average that SoCal has experienced this summer, one degree can be attributed to global warming. He also said that, had humans not developed the region, layed millions of square miles of asphalt, cut down trees and polluted the air, this area would be 5 degrees cooler on average than it is now.