Personal Climate Change

The inconvenient truth about An Inconvenient Truth (that’s the first and last time I use that pun, I promise) is that Al created his slide show to influence governments and corporations to clean up their acts but there’s very little concrete advice on what we can do… until the credits roll. Unfortunately, that’s all I’ve got to go on so I give you: What You Can Do.

Let’s tackle these one at a time and this week I’ll do some of my amateur sleuthing to figure out… compact fluorescent light bulbs aka CFLs.

From the page:

CFLs use 60% less energy than a regular bulb. This simple switch will save about 300 pounds of carbon dioxide a year. If every family in the U.S. made the switch, we’d reduce carbon dioxide by more than 90 billion pounds!

90 billion pounds is a big, meaningless number. So what do these bulbs look like, do they actually work, how much do they cost and how much will I lower my energy bill?! Stay tuned… while I whip up some google-fu for y’all.

Here I am, starting off with this new website that I’ve called Personal Climate Change and I have no idea what I’m doing.

I’ve never been a particularly environmentally minded person, I don’t recycle, I leave my computers running all day, I keep the temperature in the house way up during the winter and I’ve never made a conscious effort to reduce my carbon footprint (whatever that is). I’m not a writer or a journalist or a scientist. More importantly, I do not know what I can do about global climate change beyond what I saw in the end credits of An Inconvenient Truth.

So why did I start Personal Climate Change? Over the last two or three years I’ve been seeing talks, articles, books and movies about the imminent threat of global warming or climate crisis or climate change and I’m always struck by how dire people studying the problem appear to be. Yet, the conversation always surrounds coal power plants, developing countries, carbon credits, United Nations, Al Gore, whatever… Ok, sure, at some level I can understand these nebulous warnings and advice that is directed at the world’s governments by the world’s scientists. But day to day, I don’t care, because that stuff is so far over my head that I have no impact on these things. I can’t stop China from building coal plants anymore than I can grow extra limbs or speak Farsi. There’s never any advice for me, these people guilt me with stats and doom and the end of the world and then … they leave me hanging. Those bastards!

It’s up to me, then, to figure this stuff out on my own. That means I turn to Google and I get … 1,730,000 results and I’m overwhelmed by information, but it seems there’s no one site to tell me exactly what to do, exactly how much it will cost me, or exactly what the impact on the earth will be. Well, that sucks, and I might not have the answers yet but I plan to find out. Stay tuned.

I’m going to start by showing you what inspired me to start this site.