Energy is the hottest green topic today. You can't be online, watching TV or outside of your home without hearing someone's thoughts on gas prices, heating costs, electric bills, global warming, burning coal, wind farms and climate change.
There's also a lot of pop-culture chatter about reducing carbon footprints to help address all of these problems.
Put simply, a carbon footprint is a way to measure human impact on the environment by assessing the amount of carbon dioxide — a greenhouse gas — produced by human activities. Some organizations have developed tools that can help consumers calculate their home's carbon footprints.
Reducing your carbon footprint may sound complicated, but it can be achieved with small changes that add up to huge environmental and consumer savings across the North Shore.
This column will provide quick, easy strategies that can help you reduce the amount of energy your home needs and members of your household use. In the coming weeks, I will visit many topics to help you go green and also help address other major environmental concerns — including water quality and public health.
Green savings through green strategies
When being green results in saving money, everyone feels good about it. So, if you consider yourself to be frugal, thrifty or simply strategizing ways to make ends meet and green just seems too expensive or time consuming, this column is tailor-made for you.
Implementing green strategies into daily life may seem intimidating, or worse, a nuisance. Conventional methods, i.e., habits, just seem easier when you are heading off to work or trying to balance the rigors of family life or your monthly expenses.
Through research and testing, I will show you how easy fixes can really make a difference — saving money, reducing your carbon footprint, and eliminating some everyday habits that truly take their toll on our environment.
Complaining about gas prices?
Let's start with gas prices. The persistently climbing prices are looming large on the list of today's top consumer concerns.
To reduce gas expenses, first walk more locally whenever you can and carpool whenever possible.
Second, skip the long drive-through line at banks, coffee shops and pharmacies, opting instead to turn your car off and walk inside. And, if you are waiting curbside to pick someone up, definitely turn your car off.
According to the California Energy Commission Consumer Energy Center Web site, for every two minutes a car idles, it churns through the same amount of fuel it takes to drive about one mile. With today's cars averaging 20 to 30 miles per gallon, idling equals wasted money.
Just 30 minutes per week of idling uses nearly a half gallon of that pricey petrol we all complain about! (Note: Since nearly all cars today are fuel injected, it uses less fuel to restart your engine then to let it idle more than 10 seconds.)
Also important: With vehicle exhaust being a leading cause of hazardous air pollution — and child and adult asthma — you are improving the air quality around you directly by eliminating this habit from your daily life.
Third, consider that proper car maintenance ensures that your engine is running smoothly and needs less gas to run. Clogged air filters, improper wheel alignment and incorrect tire pressure all contribute to more gas being needed to run your engine, so have your car tuned and checked regularly.
Fourth, eliminate weight from your vehicle by removing heavy equipment and items that really don't need to live or be stored inside. The additional drag — a physical force, or variable, that increases power needs — of excess weight in the car requires more fuel to run the engine.
Lastly, realize that shopping locally is more advantageous to your monthly gas expenses and will help prolong your inevitable next trip to the pump.
For example, while groceries may be less expensive at a discount store five miles away, the time spent sitting in your car and in traffic really adds up. Consider that a gallon of gas costs more than $4 and cars average about 20 to 30 mpg. If you are driving 60 mph at about 20 mpg, you would use 3 gallons per hour and 0.25 gallons in five minutes (about $1). The frequent starts and stops you make in suburban traffic increase the frequency of speed acceleration, and therefore, gas consumption. About one hour in your car driving around to run errands costs about $11 or $12.
By combining multiple errands into one excursion, you can reduce the amount of time your car is running as compared to spreading errands over multiple trips. While planning errands to coincide with your route to and from work and picking up the kids may require that you adjust your habits a bit and take time to coordinate, it will result in less gas consumption, less strain on your wallet, reduced air pollution and a decrease in your carbon footprint.
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Andrea Fox, a Beverly resident, has been writing about environmental sustainability and eco-topics for eight years. She is a member of the Society of Environmental Journalists and a watershed protection advocate in Salem Sound Watershed.
