Many students using our footprint calculator said that they could not pledge to reduce their home footprints because they were not making the decisions for the household. Here is your chance to design your own sustainable virtual household!
If you had your own home, what would you do to make it more energy efficient? Where would you get your electricity from? Where would your house be? Would you live near to your school or work or local transit options? Where would you get your food from?
MY Family Footprint >
A Sustainable Dream Home
Recently I have noticed that many people have a different perspective on what a perfect sustainable house looks like. In my view, the house would be near work and school to reduce the carbon emissions from transportation yet still in your comfort zones. And the transportation used would be bikes and cars. Cars to drive to school and work, bikes to ride to the local market. Being near a local market can also decrease your carbon footprint by the reduction of fossil fuel use. The house would probably use LED lights due to the high energy efficiency and lower cost than incandescent light bulbs. Though air conditioning is a desire during the hot days, it would be more beneficial to use a fan. A fan costs less and uses lesser electricity. In my perspective, this is a sustainable dream home.
Gabby C,
I absolutely agree with you. The ideal house should be within walking distance of places like a school or a market. Since the start of the Industrial Revolution, scientists have presumed that over 500 billion tons of CO2 have been released into the atmosphere. Who knows how much of this has come from transportation alone.Walking or biking more often to where we want to go would be really helpful to the level of CO2 emissions. But unfortunately if one person starts biking/walking, it won't make any difference. If many people do it then maybe we would see a change, but that's a quixotic goal. So the question that comes to mind is: why should we even bother cutting down on our CO2 emissions?
For starters, fossil fuels like gasoline and diesel account for approximately 32% of CO2 emissions in the United States. You may be wondering what that means for the environment- well, nothing good. When harmful gases like these are released into the atmosphere they create the greenhouse effect. This means that the carbon dioxide in these fossil fuels traps the heat from the sun in our atmosphere rather than reflecting it. This causes a quick rise in the earth's climate affecting oceans, glaciers, wildfires, and many different parts of the environment including animals and plants. The results aren't pretty and we need to do something about it soon.