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.
So let’s go back about 100 years, just so you can figure out what happened. At the turn of the last century society was a lot more rural and sustainable. Families raised most of their food in the form of gardens and animals. They used a well that pumped up only the water they needed and used the leftovers to water the plants around the house. There was an outhouse, so effluent didn’t need to be processed at a central location and there was almost no such thing as a family car. And since everyone was a lot more spread out it was easy for the ecosystem to absorb all the co2 emissions that were produced.
It’s a completely different kind of world in most post industrial countries these days. For the first time in human history there are more people living in cities than in rural areas. Everyone all stacked together in rows upon rows of housing without nearly enough plants around to even start the process of absorbing all that co2. Almost everyone owns a car or three and don’t really have any idea where the food in the grocery store comes from and would almost starve if they were ever forced to raise any of it themselves. The heater and air conditioner are running all the time to keep those living spaces comfortable.
It’s not that all of those modern conveniences are some kind of devil. Merely that when you add up all the energy we use, and the resulting co2 emissions for all that used energy, a large city full of very convenient people makes for a massive carbon footprint. Cities and air conditioning aren’t bad, too many individuals using them irresponsibly can lead to bad things.
All those cars needed to be built, lots of carbon released there (to say nothing of the smelting of all that steel and making all the plastic that makes a car) and then there is the oil and gas industry providing all the gross stuff it takes to make all those cars run every day. zero emissions vehicles sound fine and dandy, but it’s still going to take a lot of industry to build those cars.
Now when you go back and look at the difference you’ll see just how big a shift 100 years can make. And it’s not really that big business and the industrial revolution made the world a bad place to be. It’s millions of individuals that demanded running water and central heat and air conditioning in their homes and three cars per family. Compared to the much more rural and agrarian lives our ancestors led, and it’s easy to see why co2 emissions have gone through the roof in most societies.
Industry has been under huge pressure over the last two decades to limit co2 emissions. And yet, they are still trying to serve low cost energy to hundreds of millions of people. Trying to stay in business while trimming bits off of your carbon footprint at the same time. You use the energy, but throw the effort onto someone else.
It’s not an easy thing to come to grips with, that it might not be the big, bad, greedy oil companies that pollute without any regard to the environment. It’s everyone put together demanding all that energy for our lifestyles. Yes, those companies need to take responsibility for environmental impact of operations, but there are only so many ways to do messy things and do them all with low co2 emissions. Industry is feeding the appetites of society, of cities, of – you.
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