Forecast Calling for Brown Skies

Yes, it's true. A 1.8 mile thick band of soot, particles, and toxic chemicals spreading across the Persian Gulf to Asia is making days darker and people sicker. Sunlight has decreased by 25% in some areas of Asia and estimates say that this toxic soot is responsible for nearly 350,000 deaths in China and India every year, according to scientist Henning Rohde of the University of Stockholm.

Yesterday, the United Nations reported that this thick brown cloud threatens the health and food supplies around the world and is the newest threat to the global environment. People, this is not a regional problem, it is a global problem. We can no longer ignore our neighbors because eventually, we will soon see brown skies in our own backyard. In fact, this toxic soot can move across continents within three to four days and has even drifted as far east as California.

This is an enormous problem that requires government and business support. Many businesses have adopted sustainable business practices here in the U.S. and should also require that their international operations adopt these same practices. But we cannot wait for big business to solve our problems. We need to take individual action.

According to the Energy Information Administration (a part of the U.S. Department of Energy), the average American household produces 12.4 tons of carbon dioxide each year from household activities, an additional 11.7 tons from using a car, and another 35 tons from the manufacture of all the other products and services it uses. That's a total of more than 59 tons per household per year. The global average? 9.5 tons. Don't believe me? Calculate your own carbon footprint at Conservation.org.

We have no choice. We must work, and work really hard, to keep our skies blue. So here are a few tips to reduce your carbon footprint. Yes, you've heard many of them before but what will it actually take for us all to act on them? And if you are already doing the right thing--then commit to spread the word.

* Are you a two-car family? Is that necessary? Answering this question means deciding how much you're willing to contribute to climate change simply because it's more convenient having more than one car. Can you use a train, bus or carpool to get to work? One obvious answer is to persuade your employer to let you telecommute.

* 42% of our energy use is to heat and cool our homes. If your furnace or boiler is more than 20 years old, you'll save a lot of money and energy by replacing it. It'll pay for itself. Then simply adjust your thermostat a couple of degrees. Energy Star says that for every degree difference you make, you will save 3% of your energy use.

* Don't make your water heater work so hard. Use less by installing water-conserving showerheads and faucet aerators--you can cut your hot water use in half. And finally, insulate your water heater and hot water pipes with inexpensive insulation blankets and pipe insulators found at your local hardware store.

* Use CFLs! Why aren't we all already doing that? Energy Star determined that if every American home replaced just one regular bulb with a CFL, we would save enough energy to light 3 million homes for a year, save more than $600 million in annual energy costs, and prevent the release of carbon and other greenhouse gasses equal to 800,000 cars.

* We tend to think about recycling as having to do with waste. It's not. It's all about energy. When we simply throw out glass, paper, aluminum, or plastic, we're throwing away energy: the energy that was used to produce them and that's embodied within them. You wouldn't stand at the gas station and just let the gasoline pour out on the ground and drain away, but that's exactly what you're doing when you throw out a plastic bottle, because plastic is made from oil.

Comments

[neilsmeltzer]

Sloan, You have to know someone or a group of people that want to be involved in a green project. 19 acres and natural hot springs. Help me do something good.

[wendynyc]

Food containers from takeout restaurants are the biggest item of waste.

How do we start to recycle them.

[44andmore]

One more suggestion: subscribe to your newspapers and magazines digitally, on laptop, kindle, sony reader, whatever. subscriptions are cheaper than paper so devices pay for themselves quickly (eventually saving you money), and you will save tons of paper. imagine just one year's worth of your periodicals stacked up in a pile.

[jbatch]

Two other point:

Point one --Carbon Dioxide is not the source of brown skies -- particulates are. Here in the US, we regulate particulates, SOX and NOX from power plants and industry. As a result, out skies are clearer. yet we still emit more carbon per person than any other developed nation. this is important, because if other countries like china and India adopt our solutions, we may have clearer skies, but we'll still have a boiling planet.

Point two -- a second reason our skies are clearer is that we've outsourced heavy industry. In a sense, we exported our green house gasses to third world countries. But since GHG are a global pollutant it has come back to bite us -- when we consume cheap third world manufactured products, we pollute more, even if we spend less.

And the solution to this is to integrate stringent environmental standards into all trade agreements with sanctions in the form of an environmental tariff applied to goods imported from countries which don't meet minimum environmental standards -- including, but not limited to, GHG emissions.

So I would urge you to be careful when you conflate brown skies with global warming, and posit individual action as a solution - if we don't understand the problem and it's source, we will not solve it.

[jbatch]

I believe these "You can make a difference" articlesare dangerous. Nothing short of societal change at a fundamental level will come anywhere near solving global warming.

You will note that corporations are picking up on the individual as the point of solution -- Chevron's "join us" campaign, as well as Monsanto, Dow and others. Why? Because it shifts the focus from a collective national and international solution that is binding, and enforceable.

The "you can make a difference" meme unwittingly reinforces this dodge. If it could work, then I'd be right there with you. But the truth is, until we organize as a national and international community to fundamentally change our energy infrastructure you and I can do everything -- dress in loin cloths and eat roots -- and still not solve global warming.

Don't get me wrong -- I eat less meat and buy organic; I drive a Prius and take mass transit; I have an ultra efficient home. But I do these things for moral reasons, not because I believe for a moment they will solve the problem.

Fortunately, Barack gets this; witness his response to Wiliam's debate question on what he's doing personally to solve global warming -- as Obama later observes," the question was absurd; the world will not be saved because I change a few light bulbs. It will take collective action on an international scale."

[krocklin]

I thought a carbon footprint is when you accidentally step on a piece of carbon paper.

[ElTiante]

#1. Veganism. Methane is the most damaging greenhouse gas, and the methane from all cattle and hogs in the world exceeds the amount of methane from all automobiles and planes in the world. By eating less meat (or none at all), you save money on food and healthcare and you change brown skies to blue. It's easier and cheaper than buying a new hybrid car, replacing a furnace, or starting a new government agency.

[neilsmeltzer]

Hey Sloan, I'm trying everything I can to do a green project. I have tried contacting many people. And I'm still trying. Can you please help me? Just google my name and see what the project is. Feel free to contact me. And see if we can work [e-mail]

[RetireGreen]

No! You must not work hard - you must stop working:0 Retirement is the single best action you can take to reduce climate change, better than recycling, or changing light bulbs. And the good news is, if you live a green lifestyle, you can retire early with less savings.

Lets take the two car family for example. If they get rid of one of their cars, as you correctly suggest, if they invest the $600 monthly savings, in 20 years they will have $455,000. And if they live a one car life in retirement, they can retire with $180,000 less in retirement savings, needed to pay for the expense of owning a car in retirement.

Check out Green Retirement Planning. Here is a link to a Free Green Retirement Calculator, where you can calculate the impact on your retirement, of reducing your consumption. Enter the expense of your car, mini-storage unit, coffee habit, anything, and see how much you can save.

http://www.iplanretirement.com/retiregreen.html

Also, there was a report out yesterday, and I apologize for not having the link, about how more people in two California counties die from pollution than from car crashes. I agree we are running out of time. I have a plan that will generate $150 billion per year for Green Infrastructure, create 27 million new Green Jobs within 2-3 years, and reduce the budget deficit. You can find it on the Green Retirement Blog.

[Emmory]

Invest in what?
I know plenty of people who "invested" lots of money and it's down the drain now.
But as long as they stayed "green" who cares right?

[haramagoti]

Great post! We really should call each other out on high carbon footprints as well, family member to family member, neighbor to neighbor, town to town, country to country as much as possible. Governments should run carbon footprints on their countries and set out to change policy to bring that level to a minimum. If there isn't already someone watchdogging those levels, there should be if the government doesn't, and appropriate responses from the world community should apply the pressure that would be necessary for those institutions to respond to the call for change.