HOW TO REDUCE YOUR CARBON FOOTPRINT
Reducing your carbon footprint involves taking responsibility for our pollution. There are currently no laws or taxes, and only a few economic constraints, that promote accountability toward our pollution. It is up to us to act under our own volition to reduce our impact and help secure a better future for our children.
Reducing your carbon footprint so that you are personally responsible for no net emissions of greenhouse gases, or having no carbon footprint, is called being “carbon neutral” (see discussion about this below). This should be done through a combination of three actions avoid, reduce, and offset: avoiding emission intensive activities, reducing emissions through improved efficiency, conservation and other technologies and offsetting the remaining emissions.
How to reducing your carbon footprint:
1. Calculate your current footprint. How much greenhouse gas pollution do you currently emit? This is an important, interesting and quite enlightening step. Once you know where you have started, you will be able to better assess your progress. I want to calculate my footprint
2. Reduce your footprint as much as possible. This can be done a number of ways including avoiding highly polluting activities such as flying and driving and by conserving energy wherever possible, such as replacing old technologies with new, more efficient ones, and by simply using less energy (turning off the lights and computers). To see conservation tips for all budgets, go here.
3. Offset the rest with carbon offsets. Since in this day and age it is nearly impossible to become totally emission-free, carbon offsets are a way to achieve neutrality by supporting greenhouse gas-mitigating projects. In addition, with Big Tree’s Fair Carbon™ offsets, the projects you support also empower local communities and protect local environments. Take responsibility for your pollution by supporting these important projects. How carbon offsets work. I want to calculate my footprint and offset now, our projects
It should be noted that the concept of carbon neutrality is more complex than it seems. At the heart of the issue lies the question: which emissions should a person be responsible for? Where are the “boundaries” drawn between what is one person’s responsibility and what is another’s? For example, most people agree that one should be responsible for the emissions that result from driving their car. Should someone, however, be responsible for the emissions that were caused by the manufacture of the car, or the mining of the raw materials? What about the car or mining companies? Surely they should be responsible for the efficiency of their operations. The consumer, on the other hand, has the power to choose to buy a car from a more efficient company. This conundrum is present with almost every product or service and leads to a real difficulty when it comes to determining if a person or business is really carbon neutral.