So doing nothing at home for the next vacation is an easy option. Other better things are turning off the car instead of idling, which accounts for about 30 million metric tons of carbon dioxide emissions in the United States a year.
Change the way other things in your life do nothing. Similarly, when appliances do nothing, they often still burn fossil fuels. Reserve energy accounts for 4.6 percent of residential carbon emissions. To fix this, turn off your internet router at night, turn off your computer, unplug your cell phone when it is fully charged, and choose appliances that have low power requirements. To go beyond saving standby energy, Karl Coplan, author of “Live Now Sustainably,” suggests depriving fossil fuel companies of their sales revenue by switching to a renewable electricity contract and upgrading to an electric car the next opportunity you have ”.
Be very lazy and drink from the tap. What could be lazier than crawling into your own sink and pouring a glass of water? And yet, today we often replace this lower custom of American habits by driving to a store and buying a plastic water bottle. According to a 2009 Italian scientific analysis, this could end up costing us significantly more in carbon dioxide emissions than tap drinking water.
Undo the car one day a week. Collectively, Americans travel more than three trillion miles annually. (More than 10 years that would take us to Alpha Centauri, the closest star system to Earth.) That’s about 4.6 tons of carbon per vehicle a year, according to the Environmental Protection Agency . Transportation is the main contributor to U.S. carbon emissions, according to the agency. Therefore, skipping a day of driving each week would significantly reduce an individual’s contribution to emissions.
Upgrade a forest instead of your phone. A smartphone does not support a huge carbon charge. Apple reports that a single iPhone 11 results in the emission of about 70 kilograms of carbon dioxide emissions during its life cycle. But if you donated the several hundred dollars you typically spent on a phone upgrade to a program that managed a carbon sequestration ecosystem, you could be slashing a much larger portion of your budget’s carbon. For the best possible carbon sequestration, consider mangrove. Mangrove forests are one of the most powerful carbon sinks in the world; those in the Amazon store twice as much carbon per hectare as the region’s tropical forests.
Get rid of fossil fuels. We are all involved in the carbon economy through our daily financial transactions. The headline of a recent New York trial by climate activist Bill McKibben said: “Money is the oxygen on which the fire of global warming burns.” How to address it? “Switching to a fossil-free index fund is a no-brainer: among other things, they’re outperforming the market,” McKibben wrote to me recently.
For those who do not invest but have a credit card and a bank account, Mr. McKibben suggested going a step further. “As we approach Earth Day at age 50, we cut your Chase card or transfer your money to a new bank: JPMorgan Chase has become by far the largest financier in the fossil fuel industry.”
Herein lies the truly profound global effect of the carbon-obsessed U.S. economy, according to data compiled in a “fossil fuel financing report” recently published by a group of environmental organizations. Four of the world’s five largest institutional investors in fossil fuels are US-based banks
Paul Greenberg is the Safina Center-based writer and most recently author of “The Omega Principle: Seafood and the Search for a Longer Life and a Healthier Planet.”
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