Your carbon footprint. It’s how scientists describe the sum of all the planet-warming gases emitted as you go through your daily life. It covers the carbon-based pollutants — mainly carbon dioxide (CO2) and methane (CH4) — associated with everything from powering our homes to getting around, producing our food and making all the stuff we buy. Globally, Americans, on average, tend to have the biggest carbon footprints. And bigger footprints drive more global warming. The good news: There are dozens of things each of us can do to shrink the size of that footprint.
Here are eight that many scientists suggest we start with. Some are easy and cost little to nothing. Others may require effort, time and money. A few may even be out of reach right now, depending on where we live. But even small individual efforts add up, especially when we combine them with changing policy. And there’s more good news: Many of these changes will improve our health as well as the climate. And in the long run, most will save us money.
1. Slash food waste
About one-third of all food gets wasted each year. That figure comes from the United Nation’s Food and Agriculture Organization in Rome, Italy. Producing food that won’t be eaten wastes valuable resources, including energy. It also creates a lot of greenhouse gases. Emissions of those gases from producing uneaten food has the warming potential of about 3.5 billion tons (gigatons) of CO2. That amount is higher than the total greenhouse gas emissions of any single country other than the United States or China.
So one good way to reduce greenhouse emissions is to “eliminate food waste,” says Nick Hewitt. He’s a climate scientist at Lancaster University. It’s in the United Kingdom.
Fossil fuels are used to make fertilizers, power equipment and irrigate fields. They provide the energy to process, package and transport foods. Any food thrown into the trash will likely be sent to a landfill,…
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