Compared to the carbon footprint that the world needs in order to maintain a stable climate (1,000kgs per year) my own footprint is approximately 12 times as much. However, my total is only 1.3 times as much as the average Californian. My food was the highest of my carbon emissions with a total of 4,900kgs followed by transportation at 4,600kgs. There are many ways that I can reduce my food emissions. An example would be limiting or substituting my red meet consumption from my diet. I could also buy food locally from a farmers market to reduce the processing and shipping costs that use a lot of energy. As for transportation, I might need to take fewer long distance trips to cut down on my transportation emissions. Regarding home energy use, my family uses solar panels. However, there are a few things we can do to reduce our energy use. Improve insulation and keep the thermostat at a lower temperature in the winter, and a high temperature in the summer to save on energy. There are many excellent sources on global warming and the steps we can take to reduce our carbon footprint. Two that I found especially useful are from "Sustainability at Georgetown University" and "AustinTexas.gov".

I can definitely relate to this for several reasons. First, my carbon footprint(13,034kgs) is about 34 percent higher than the average Californian(9,727kgs). I think this is mostly due to my high totals of transportation and food. Even though I take the bus to school regularly, I had many flights, which accounted for most of my transportation footprint. I could limit this by going on more road trips when I have the opportunity to. The reason for my food value is that I eat red meat in many of my meals and don't have many vegetarian meals. I could change this by keeping a close eye on the amount of red meat I can eat. Since my family has solar panels our house footprint is around the average amount but we can limit our use of the central AC and heating. We can limit this by utilizing our windows more often throughout the years.