Margaret Mellon

The Weight of the Evidence

You have undoubtedly heard a good deal about global warming. But if you’re like most Americans, you feel somewhat confused about the topic. According to a national survey in 2010, only one in every 10 Americans feels very well informed about the causes of global warming and how Earth’s climate system works. In other words, 90 percent of us consider ourselves a little shaky on the particulars.

Making Government Work for Us

You have made a number of effective climate choices in your own life. You’ve spread the word to friends, family members, and coworkers. Now it’s time to make sure your elected officials hear your voice, too. From our cities or towns to state and federal government, officials are making decisions on our behalf and with our tax dollars. Put simply, these funds can be spent to improve our energy future or to impoverish it. Along the way, especially in Washington, DC, lobbyists help protect companies that benefit from continued reliance on coal, oil, and gas, regardless of its longterm impact on the environment or the U.S. economy, blocking renewable energy and delaying energy efficiency measures and other efforts to limit carbon emissions.

Sweat the Right Stuff

What are the most effective steps each of us can take to reduce our carbon emissions? This is the question the Climate Team at the Union of Concerned Scientists (UCS) set out to answer in this book. Of course, the best steps for you depend to some extent on how you live now. Some of us drive big cars, others ride the bus; some live in large houses, others in tiny studio apartments. The United States is a big country, and geography makes a difference, too: in colder climates, home heating naturally accounts for a far greater share of a household’s emissions; city dwellers, meanwhile, tend to be less reliant on cars, with far fewer emissions in the transportation category than their rural counterparts.

Can One Person Make a Difference

This book is about the steps you can take and the choices you can make to combat global warming.

Driving Down Emissions

There’s no point in searching your house for the largest contribution you make to climate change: the culprits are most likely parked in your driveway. If you are like the average American, driving accounts for about one-quarter of your total carbon emissions. There is simply no getting around the fact that our cars are a sizable piece of the global warming problem.

Welcome to Our Low-Carbon Future

Outside Madison Square Garden in the heart of New York City, visitors are dwarfed by a seven-story sign designed by scientists at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and paid for by Deutsche Bank. With a whir of numbers in a vast digital readout, the sign—the world’s largest “carbon counter”—offers a real-time running total of the cumulative number of metric tons of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere worldwide. As of this writing, the count stands at 3.69 trillion metric tons, the highest level of atmospheric carbon in 800,000 years. Worse yet, the numbers whirring on the counter show that carbon dioxide is being added to Earth’s atmosphere at the rate of 800 tons per second.

Step Up, Connect, Transform

Now that you have followed the steps in the previous chapters to lower your personal share of global warming emissions by 20 percent or more, what else can you do? You may be inspired to go further toward carbon neutrality. If so, we salute your efforts. But one of the most important contributions you can make is also to step up, connect with others, and share the knowledge and experience you’ve gained. After all, your efforts are vitally needed. You now have the tools to help others make more effective climate choices, too. Only by passing along the know-how and working with others in our communities can Americans make the really substantial and necessary reductions in emissions to forestall the worst of global warming.

Stepping Up at Work

Jobs in the United States are as diverse as the nation’s people: some of us work in offices, others in stores, factories, restaurants, or hospitals. Some are employed by large corporations, and others are sole proprietors of small businesses or consultancies. But no matter what your job is or where you do it, you can help reduce emissions at work. Small changes can make a big difference when they are widely adopted. Our workplaces offer a powerful venue to magnify the impact of the effective climate choices we make as individuals.

A Low-Carbon Diet

In deciding what to eat each day, most of us consider a variety of factors, from fat and calories to what tastes best. But we don’t usually think about the amount of global warming emissions resulting from the food we eat. The fact is, though, if you’re trying to reduce your personal share of global warming emissions, your diet can make a big difference.

Taking Charge of Electricity at Home

For convenience and versatility, electricity is hard to beat. It’s no wonder that our per capita consumption of electricity has risen steadily ever since the technology became available. And just since 1970, U.S. residential electricity use has gone up by 39 percent, reflecting the overall trend toward larger homes and a greater variety of electronic gadgets in each one. We seem to become more and more reliant on electric devices, even for tasks—from brushing our teeth to reading books and magazines—that we used to do without electricity. According to the U.S. Department of Energy’s International Energy Outlook 2010, worldwide electricity use is projected to rise by roughly 70 percent between 2010 and 2035.