Final Blog Post

After entering information into the calculator on the nature.org website, I learned that my household's carbon footprint is 34 tons of CO2 a year. Based on the statistics of similar families, which produce around 73 tons, my footprint is 53% better than average. I believe the majority of my carbon emissions are from traveling by car. Because my home area is somewhat rural, local travel often requires a car. Even though we do not have much choice but to drive around town for chores and other tasks, our yearly miles driven are not as high as most families. At the same time, frequent long distance trips to weekend sporting events are also common in my family.  These factors lead to our greatest footprint being from automobiles. To minimize our emissions as much as possible, my parents and I do take certain steps to lessen the CO2 output. Since their jobs are located nearby one another, my parents normally carpool to work in one vehicle. Even so, a 20-30 minute commute certainly uses a decent amount of fuel every month. While I am at college, I decided to leave my car at home where it does not get used. Instead, I only travel around school with friends. We almost never drive anywhere with less than 3 people in the vehicle. Carpooling is a simple, yet effective solution to decreasing our carbon footprint. While my mother's car gets great gas mileage, my father and I drive larger vehicles that do not have the best MPG numbers. To lessen our impact on the environment, we can invest in more efficient cars in the near future. This will likely be an important consideration during our next vehicle purchase. In terms of long distance travel, my family does not typically go on more than 1 or 2 airplane flights each year. If we travel for vacation it is only on a short range flight to somewhere like Florida. Unlike many people who rely on airlines for business travel almost every week, my parents do not spend much time on planes. for work. Our next biggest contributor is likely energy consumption. While our kitchen appliances, televisions, and other large electric devices are up to date with energy efficient technology, we still use these objects quite a bit. I do not think our home's heating or cooling system is a major issue, because we take care to ensure that during the winter, we do not set the temperature too high, and during the summer we do not set it too low. This means the system is never working too hard or for long periods of time. The price of our electric bill is reduced, as is our carbon footprint. On the other hand, fitting our lamps or ceiling lights with energy efficient bulbs would be an improvement that could allow us to further lower our consumption. In the food department, we do eat an average to above average amount of meat, dairy, and fruits and vegetables every day. Although this might be slightly negative for our carbon footprint, we have a fairly healthy diet that is not likely to change dramatically. If you have a diet that works well, I do not think it is a particularly great idea to change it based on the environmental impact it may have. Portion sizes and health should be the main concerns regarding food intake. My family's shopping footprint is relatively small at 6 tons of CO2, meaning there are few options for us to improve in this category. The calculator website recommends going organic. I believe we consume an acceptable amount of organic goods, as we shop at local farms and markets for many products. Overall, I am mostly pleased with my household carbon footprint. I did not actually realize many of the positives until thinking more about our behavior while entering the information into the calculator. Today there are many options for efficient products that make it easier to reduce your emissions. I think the greatest potential for improvement is still with automobiles. It will take more time for people to switch over to electric or hybrid vehicles. Manufacturer's also need time to develop technology that makes all types of cars more efficient. I think it is useful for more people to be aware of their carbon footprint not only to overcome the nature of this collective action problem, but also so they can become more conscious of their actions and start to improve their homes one by one.