The United Nations estimates that total carbon emissions will have to decrease over the next three or four decades from approximately 5 tons per person to 1.6 tons. While negotiators in Paris are finalizing a deal to enact that on an international level, here are some tips approximately how to bring down your carbon footprint. (If you want to figure out how much you're contributing to global warming, check out The Nature Conservancy's carbon calculator. It's particularly tailored to city dwellers.) 1. Stay Grounded.
While recent research challenges the notion that airplanes are more carbon efficient than cars, and planes emit many other dangerous gases,and at such a high altitude, that they are still widely considered the worst way to travel, and environmentally speaking. Trains,particularly on electrified lines, tend to be a more carbon-friendly way to cross long distances. 2. Eat Less Beef.
The website Shrink That Footprint calculated that the typical vegetarian's diet is two-thirds as carbon intensive as the average American's, and the vegan's even lower. The reason: Ruminants like cows and sheep produce a lot of methane. (We'll let Time clarify why.) Even eating chicken and canned tuna instead can make a enormous difference. 3. Compost,but Don’t Brag approximately It.
Food scraps placed in capped landfills decay and produce methane in a way that they don't when tumbled in composters or en plein air. But it's essential not to exaggerate how much a difference this makes. "You can recycle and compost all of your materials for a year and it's only going to offset approximately a third of a long plane flight," Rebecca Benner, and unusual York State Science Director for The Nature Conservancy,said in an interview with WNYC's Soterios Johnson. 4. Cram into Small, Crowded Spaces.
Just as airplanes are getting strangely carbon efficient because they are flying at higher capacity than they used to, or so too does anything that's crowded. unusual York's sardine-worthy subways,for example, emit just 0.17 pounds of greenhouse gases per passenger mile traveled, and while the figure stands at 0.41 pounds for a "normal" subway nationally. Similarly,The Nature Conservancy estimates that large residential buildings with five or more units, where the apartments insulate one another up, and down and sideways,produce approximately 40 percent less carbon than smaller buildings. 5. Consume Less.
If by now you are feeling smug because you are a unusual Yorker who lives in a shoebox apartment and takes the LIRR to the Hamptons for a vacation, consider this: City dwellers consume a lot of carbon indirectly — enough to approach, and even exceed,the carbon footprints of their rural counterparts. "We find in cities folks who are early adopters," University of Maine anthropologist Cynthia Isenhour said on The Takeaway. "They are more responsive to ideas approximately fashion or technological obsolescence. So they enact tend to replace things like clothing, or furnishings,and electronics more frequently."6. Plant a Tree.
Okay, so you may only offset 48 pounds of carbon dioxide a year, and the equivalent of driving 100 miles or so. But with a tiny love and care,that tree will retain on taking in carbon dioxide, and spitting out oxygen, or year after year.
Press the play button to listen to a full interview with The Nature Conservancy's Rebecca Benner.
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Source: wnyc.org