Time to Put a Price on Carbon!

"Research shows that curbing climate change and growing the economy can and must go hand-in-hand. A well-designed carbon price can help the United States achieve its climate goals while improving economic efficiency and fostering growth."

This is an excellent article promoting carbon pricing, which I thought was especially interesting because I have been working on Carbon Washington's campaign for a carbon tax in our state. Carbon Washington's approach is basically the same policy as the one in B.C., which has full support of their residents. The article states that "as a result of the revenue-neutral tax swap it implemented, the province used carbon tax revenue to reduce other taxes. It now has the lowest personal income tax rates in Canada and one of the lowest corporate income tax rates in North America."

Hopefully we will see a similar implementation and results in our state and hopefully the U.S. as a whole! This article makes it seem like there is no reason not to get on board with carbon pricing.

Read the rest of the article here

Lowering my Ecological Footprint

While my results were still generally shocking/disappointing, I did manage to lower my footprint!
However, it will still take 2.15 Earths to sustain the population if everyone lived like me.

Certain changes were difficult to make, others were harder. Not eating meat was difficult, but things like changing my power sources to 100% renewable energy was an easy transition. The hardest changes to make were the ones that changed my daily routine. However, after getting used to it, things like unplugging everything at the end of the night was not too bad.

Compared to my original results, I have managed to lower my footprint by a little over one earth by making a few small changes. This amazes me because although the dietary change was difficult at times, most of the other changes I made were fairly easy to do. Below are my original results so it is easy to visualize which sectors I made the greatest improvements.

Compared to my original results, my carbon footprint slightly decreased. I definitely walked and took the bus a lot more this quarter. Cutting meat out of my diet lowered my food footprint by nearly 50%, which is really shocking to me but is a very good incentive to keep up a vegetarian diet. I love meat, so I may have to change it to only eating meat once a week, but I am definitely going to keep this in mind when making future decisions. My housing footprint decreased by very little, which I was surprised by because I thought switching to PSE's green power plan would make a dramatic difference in my impact; apparently not. My goods and services footprint was cut in half as well, mainly because of my attention to packaging and sourcing, as well as not purchasing any new items (only second-hand).

While I have taken this Ecological Footprint quiz before, this assignment was a lot more informational because we actually had to attempt to lower our impact over time. Making changes versus listing the changes you could make was a lot more beneficial because it made realize that there actually are easy ways to make a big difference in reducing your impact. However you do have to think about it. It is easier in the US to live a very wasteful lifestyle than a sustainable way of life, so you must be aware of what activities your impact is coming from.