Quote:
Originally Posted by jorgelito
I try to reduce my carbon footprint. I enjoy doing so. I also like to quantify it as well. i have begun an organic vegetable garden in my yard, I recycle regularly, and try to reduce waste in my life. My main struggle has been my obsession with paper napkins. But other than that, I'm good. My next project is solar power. Don''t know how I'm gonna do it since I'm renting. I have made lifestyle changes. Being conservative, reducing, reusing, recycling, changing out all my light bulbs to compact fluorescent (5 for 1$), changing my driving habits (going from 25mpg to 33mpg).
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I also try to do these kinds of things, and I enjoy doing them--it feels less wasteful to me, and whether or not it effects global warming, etc, I like to know that all the crap I am producing with my modern lifestyle (bottles, newspapers, printer cartridges, batteries, etc) will not be taking up eternal space in a landfill. It's just my personal feeling.
But the really discouraging part is that a single, long-distance flight will pretty much overwhelm everything you could possibly do to "save the earth" in one year. Pollution from commercial flights is one of the worst environmental offenders out there, and it's so huge that basically any small things you are doing on a day-to-day basis, mean nothing if you travel by plane even once a year. This is very hard for me to swallow, because travel is one of my top priorities in life, and I fly a LOT--not to mention that Iceland is an island, so getting anywhere by "land" would be pretty nuts (there is one ferry that takes a week to get to Europe, lol). So until the airlines manage to find a way to reduce their gargantuan carbon emissions, all of us frequent flyers will continue to leave massive carbon footprints just by virtue of stepping onto those planes...