* You: 1 in 6 billion
* Reducing your carbon footprint — one watt at a time
Melting glaciers, rising sea levels, loss of animal and plant life — there’s plenty of evidence to suggest what might happen as climate change continues. And none of it is good.
But what’s one person in six billion to do?
Lots. There are literally hundreds of things a person can do or stop doing to affect climate change.
From turning down the thermostat and putting on a sweater to installing solar panels, it’s all a matter of where a person is in their commitment to reduce their energy consumption.
“It’s not that you have to do everything,” said Evelyn Adams of Anacortes-based Skagit Beat the Heat. “Just do something. Learn and get involved.”
The relationship between human activity and climate change is simple: Humans use energy in a variety of ways. Most energy creates carbon dioxide, the main antagonist in the climate change drama. How much carbon dioxide a person uses in daily life is called a carbon footprint.
If people can reduce their carbon footprint, they’ve helped slow climate change, even if it’s one watt at a time.
But like melting glaciers and rising sea levels, trying to understand what an individual can do can seem daunting. That’s the perception the Beat the Heat group is trying to change locally.
“The key is to get them involved without overwhelming them,” Adams said.
Even as a group, Adams said their 35 or so members had to organize and prioritize so they wouldn’t get overwhelmed by a deluge of possibilities and information.
“There’s only so much we can bite off at a time,” she said.
So for now, the group has four committees addressing different aspects of climate change.
For example, the transportation group has worked to have “No Idling” signs placed at Anacortes schools and made bike racks available downtown. The political action group encouraged and supported the town of Anacortes in creating a resource manager position in the city.
They also have plans to more heavily advocate for climate issues at the city, county and state government level.
The energy group, headed by Erik Shen, helps people learn how to map their own carbon footprint, and organizes energy fairs and informational sessions for the public.
The public awareness group, headed by Shen’s wife, Betty Carteret, works to inform as many people as possible about climate change and how to make changes in their lives.
Public awareness
A large, recent effort by the public awareness group was to host a class on climate change at the Anacortes Senior College.
During the first half of the six-session class, Carteret and Shen presented an overview of the science and effects of global warming, talked about carbon emissions and carbon footprints, and about climate change projections. In the second half, students learned about energy alternatives and how to act on an individual and community level to slow climate change.
Carteret said some students were already well aware of the issues.
“We kind of preach to the choir,” she said. “But the choir needs to have more information, too.”
Shen said there also were students who craved more information.
“We’ve also had several people that haven’t made a decision about global warming yet,” he said.
For student Linda Fanford, the class provided information about climate change that she can pass to others.
“For me, it’s picking up any information I can and sharing that information,” she said.
Fanford, a real estate agent with American Dream Real Estate, works with clients to help them reduce their carbon footprint through housing.
“Selling homes for selling homes just doesn’t work for me,” she said.
Instead, she helps home buyers evaluate a prospective property about how energy efficient it is and how other structural aspects, such as paint and insulation, affects the home’s carbon emissions. She also tries to show builders the benefits of native plants, tree planting and building with the local topography, or how current homeowners can upgrade a home.
Fanford has implemented several energy-saving and carbon-reducing strategies in her own home by installing formaldehyde-free insulation, using compact fluorescent lighting and reducing her “phantom energy” by using energy strips for appliances, allowing her to easily cut the power to them so that they’re not plugged in constantly.
Fanford said it’s important for her not to overwhelm her clients, but provide them with information they can use.
“To me, it’s going to be a process, a lifetime process,” she said. “To get people started, it’s about giving them some basic choices that they can start having a conversation with someone about.
“It’s just working with people where they are and appreciating where they are and offering information.”
Fanford recently had a compact fluorescent bulb give-away in her Anacortes neighborhood, where she offered to install the light bulbs as porch lights for her neighbors. Some neighbors were curious about the bulbs, and Fanford was happy to tell them how switching bulbs would save energy and money.
“The conversations were so different,” Fanford said. “But they all walked away with something.”
Many involved
Skagit Beat the Heat is not the only organization trying to get locals involved in the climate change conversation. The group works with several other local or state agencies, such as Northwest Clean Air Agency, the Guemes Energy Efficient Club and Washington State University Beach Watchers.
Also planned is a new Washington State University extension program called Climate Stewards. The program is attempting to organize its first branch in Skagit County and plans to begin its efforts in September. The program is loosely based on the Beach Watchers program, said Chrys Bertolotto with WSU Extension.
Committed volunteers will have to complete about 20 hours of training. Then the group will decide on activities and outreach programs to get local residents involved. The group also will work with municipalities such as Anacortes, La Conner, Coupeville and Langley, which have adopted plans about climate change or have drafted plans for their communities.
“We want to help people help communities to reduce their carbon footprint,” Bertolotto said.
The program will help mobilize people to not only spread information about climate change, but help residents make changes that can reduce their personal and the community’s carbon footprint. None of those specifics is defined yet, Bertolotto said, because the Climate Stewards group will develop those activities and outreach programs based on what the individual communities might be interested in.
“We want to give people a menu from which they can act,” she said.
Beat the Heat also hopes that providing information will help residents to make conscious decisions about their energy consumption, no matter how small.
While Carteret and Shen said they’ve been watching their energy consumption for years, it was an analogy used by Adams that got them active in Beat the Heat.
They went to listen to Adams talk about the group when it first formed about two years ago. She wore a teaspoon lapel pin and used it to illustrate her point that that if everyone did a teaspoon worth of action to address global warming, all their small efforts would add up to large changes.
Now the couple find themselves doing much more than a teaspoon, but said once a person pays attention to his carbon footprint, one simple factor can help feed the commitment — the money savings.
“Some items take less than five minutes, but save money right away,” Carteret said. “And then you’re hooked. It’s addictive.”
For Shen, he said combating climate change also is a moral issue. Wealthier nations can better afford to make the changes early on, even though evidence shows that many of the effects of global warming will hit impoverished areas first, he said.
It’s important to show people that reducing energy consumption is more about changing habits than giving things up, Adams said.
“It’s not about deprivation, but I think that’s what people feel sometimes,”she said. “It’s about just trying not to be wasteful.”
Still, some of the science is hard for people to wrap their minds around, Carteret said. The effects that scientists say might occur because of climate change are hard for people to visualize, Carteret said.
“When everything looks fine here, the tendency is to think things are fine,” Shen said.
But by the time some of those effects are plain to see, the damage will be done.
“The time to learn is now,” Carteret said. “Not when it’s a crisis.”
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Skagit Warming: Tell us what you think
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