What you and a Million Kids Can Do -- Starting Right Now
This image is from How We Know What We Know About Our Changing Climate: Scientists and Kids Explore Global Warming and reproduced with the permission of Lynne Cherry and Gary Braasch. Copyright 2008 Lynne Cherry, Gary Braasch and Dawn Publications
The pie chart above shows how a million kids could help save about 4.5 million tons of CO2/yr right away—that’s a coal-burning power plant we won’t need! These are only some of many things you can do to reduce your climate footprint.
Something else you and your family can do is so big that it’s literally “off the chart”: household appliances—washers, dryers refrigerators, etc.—use a huge amount of energy. If one million families replace their old appliances with energy-star models, it will stop more than 3,000,000 tons of CO2/yr.
The grand total of all these actions that a million kids and their families can start doing right now is about 7.5 million tons of CO2. There are about 36 million families with school-age kids in the United States. Think of all that CO2 saved if every family did these simple actions to cut their energy use and emissions! The total could be about 270 million tons of carbon dioxide not sent into our air, which is the output of more than 60 coal fired power plants. It equals about five percent of the US total emissions in 2007 -- and if the kids and parents will encourage similar reductions at school, work and in the factory we can make an even bigger dent in our greenhouse gas output.
For more about what you can do to reduce your carbon footprint see: HowWeKnowClimateChange.com.