How to lower your carbon footprint

Julio Rodriguez
Editor-in-Chief

Mark Dunlea came to Hudson Valley last Tuesday to share some steps you can take to decrease your carbon footprint and help ensure the longevity of future generations.

There is a 30-40 percent chance the human race may go extinct by 2070 as a result of climate change.

It’s agreed that the main cause of current global warming trends is human expansion of the “greenhouse effect” — warming that results when the atmosphere traps heat radiating from Earth toward space, according to research compiled by scientists at NASA.
The gases that contribute to the greenhouse effect are nitrous oxide, carbon dioxide, methane and water vapor.

Essentially, these molecules become trapped in our atmosphere when they’re expelled and cause warming on the planet. We can, however, take steps to help reduce the emissions of these gases into our atmosphere at a more micro-level.

Move to a completely plant-based diet

“A pound of beef has 18 times the carbon footprint as a pound of pasta,” Dunlea said. “If an average family of four was to cut their meat consumption in half, that’s roughly three tons of emissions annually. One of the problems is that the [people of the] U.S. eats a lot of meat because we’re richer.”

Dunlea continued, “If you personally want to [do] something, people have meatless Mondays. Young people tend to be very good about this. Older people will migrate back to meat eating.”

Have less children

“Want to fight climate change? Then have less children,” Dunlea said. “If you truly want to fight it, have less white children. The typical American burns twice as much as the average person in Europe and Japan, in terms of carbon emissions, but ten times as much as the average person in India.”

Reduce personal car use

“Transportation is about a third of the total carbon footprint,” Dunlea explained. “Ride a bike to work [and] school. I live about ten miles from here, out in Poestenkill, and the last time I checked, we had one bus for one day of the week. So, you could ride the bus into town to go to the doctor’s or go to the store for senior citizens. But, there is no mass transit in a good part of Rensselaer county.”

Dunlea continued, “I’ve found that millennials are very good about using mass transit. They tend to live in big cities which have much less of a carbon footprint when compared with suburban areas.”

100 percent renewable energy in NY

“There’s a gentleman named Mark Jacobson — he’s a professor,” Dunlea said. “He wrote a report on whether it’s possible for New York state to move to 100 percent clean energy for everything by 2030. The answer was yes. More recently, from putting out reports, it says that it’s 2050. We can do it by 2030 with current technology.”

New sustainable housing

“I live in a community in Poestenkill, which organized 30 years ago around sustainability principles,” Dunlea stated. “Every house that we’ve built had to be high efficiency, in terms of insulations. What we would do is build the house facing the southwest, so that way, it’s facing the sun.”

Avoid heating with natural gas

“Natural gas contains methane,” Dunlea said. “Methane is 82 times more potent as a greenhouse gas over 20 years. Carbon dioxide is worse over time — about a century or two. Short term, you have to get methane out as a greenhouse gas. We should stop building natural gas plants.”