Kim & Phillipa's Blog

Today I received an email from STA travel about “Carbon Offsets” where for just $8 (domestic) or $20 (international), you can “offset” your flight’s carbon emissions.  What a fantastic idea!  There are so many people who are cautious about carbon emissions, yet still want to travel the globe. Then we feel guilty about wanting to do both.

I’m getting right into the carbon emission thing now after seeing Al Gore’s “An Inconvenient Truth“, which everyone simply must see (it actually made me embarrased to be an Australian).  I’m even working on a reporting solution for carbon emissions at work which is pretty cool!

So anyway, I was completing a survey about what I think about this “Carbon Credits” travel thing.  The last question was:

What other personal sacrifices do you make to combat global warming?

• turn off appliances at power points 
• use alternative forms of transport other than a car
• modified your home to make it more energy efficient
• changed your light bulbs to fluorescent bulbs
• Other (please specify)

And although I try to do the first 4, it was the last one that struck me.  Do I actually do much more than that?  I’ve always been environmentally concious - possibly because my family raised me to respect the environment and it’s resources.  But now I realise that I could do more – lots more.

Things YOU can do…

• Follow these 10 tips (sorry about the pounds, I converted everything else):
• Change a light Replacing one regular light bulb with a compact fluorescent light bulb will save 150 pounds of carbon dioxide a year
• Drive less Walk, bike, carpool or take public transport more often.  You’ll save 1.5 pounds of carbon dioxide for every kilometre you dont drive
• Recycle more  You can save 2,400 pounds of carbon dioxide per year by recycling just half of your household waste
• Check your tyres  Keeping your tyres inflated properly can improve fuel mileage by more than 3%.  Every litre of fuel saved keeps 76 pounds of carbon dioxide out of the atmosphere
• Use less hot water  It takes a lot of energy to heat water.  Use less hot water by installing a low flow showerhead (350 pound of CO2 saved per year) and washing your clothes in cold water (500 pounds saved per year)
• Avoid products with a lot of packaging  You can save 1,200 pounds of carbon dioxide if you cut down your garbage by 10%
• Adjust your thermostat  Moving your thermostate down just 2 degrees in winter and up 2 degrees in summer can save about 2,000 pounds of carbon dioxide a year
• Plant a tree  A single tree will absorb 1 tonne of carbon dioxide over its lifetime
• Turn off electronic devices  Simply turning off your TV, DVD player, stereo and computer when you’re not using them will save you thousands of pounds of carbon dioxide a year
• If you visit Sunrise’s cooltheglobe.com website, you can actually have an information pack sent to you which gives you a whole list of ways to do your part.  There’s also something called “Australia’s Inconvenient Truth” which I can only imagine is related to Al Gore’s presentation.
• Visit Al Gore’s climatecristis.net/takeaction/whatyoucando/ for a list of the things we can all do NOW

This entry was posted on Wednesday, April 4th, 2007 at 9:07 pm and is filed under General, Travel. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.