Living Like Ed by Ed Jr. (whitelam books .txt) 📗

taking away the green power that they’re putting in the system. That’s real, too. And over time, that could balance out and account for the closure of power plants. At some point, they’ll be shutting down coal plants because they have sufficient power coming from clean sources. (We’ll go into this more in Chapter 4, “Energy.”) If every air passenger bought a TerraPass each time he or she flew, it would be a very real contribution to creating greener energy for all of us.

TerraPass is the best way I have found to mitigate my carbon footprint, and the company makes it very easy. For a plane flight, you just go online to TerraPass.com, log on, and enter your miles traveled and how many people are traveling. You can then buy a TerraPass to balance the emissions for your level of energy use. You can also buy a yearly TerraPass, if you just want to give an estimate to make things easy so you’re not doing it every trip. And it’s very inexpensive, something like $7 for the last airplane trip we took.

So far, 40,000 people have bought TerraPasses, so that’s a lot of green energy fed into the system, a lot of very real offsets that have occurred. Imagine if 400,000 people did it. If four million people did it. Everybody would take notice then.

A TerraPass for Your Car

Maybe you can’t go out and buy an electric car or a hybrid or an alternative-fuel vehicle right now. You don’t have the money at the moment, or maybe you really love the car you have. You can still make a real difference, environmentally speaking, by purchasing a TerraPass for your car.

They’re going to ask you, “How many miles do you drive annually?” All you do is see what it says on your odometer and—unless you had some extraordinary big year of driving, or big year of not driving—divide that number by the amount of years since you bought the car, if you bought it new. (If you bought it used, look at the receipt and see how many miles it had when you purchased it, then deduct that from the total on the odometer before you average out your annual mileage.)

Next, you select your car model from the list on the website, and it will tell you what size TerraPass you need to mitigate the amount of CO2 you put out in a year’s worth of driving.

I mostly drive my electric car, but I do drive cross-country in the hybrid sometimes, so I computed that amount for my cross-country drives. For a Prius, for 10,000 miles a year, it was less than $40. It wasn’t a lot of money, and I feel good about it.

It’s All About Choices

Every day, you have choices—probably even more than you realize. You can get in your car and drive to a store that’s three blocks away or you can walk there. You can ride your bike there. You can get some exercise and reduce pollution and reduce traffic congestion at the same time—or not. Your call.

If you have to go farther than you can comfortably walk or bike, you can choose public transportation if that is an option where you live. You can take a train or a bus or the subway. Again, it’s a chance for you to reduce traffic congestion and reduce pollution and multitask, too. You can get some work done or read a book while you ride.

When you do have to drive—say it’s 40 degrees below zero outside or you have to go someplace that you can’t reach by public transportation or you can’t get there quickly enough by bus or by train—you still have other choices. You can drive an electric car or you can drive a hybrid or you can drive an alternative-fuel vehicle. You also can get a TerraPass, make one choice—one easy choice for very little money—and make a genuine difference, no matter what you drive. And the same goes for those times when you have to fly.

It’s all about choices, and none of them are painful. They’re not going to make you suffer—regardless of what my wife might say. Often it’s quite the opposite. Often, these choices will make you feel good while you do something good.

Which brings us to another series of feel-good, do-good choices: choices about what to do with your trash, with your waste. And the short answer is: Recycle.

Health experts say walking 30 minutes a day will add 1.3 years to your life. Walking greatly reduces the risk of diabetes, heart disease, and even cancer and glaucoma. Walking can lower your body fat, your cholesterol levels, and your blood pressure.

If you ride 4 miles on a bike instead of driving, you will keep 15 pounds of pollutants out of the air we breathe. If just one person in your family uses public transportation regularly—as a way to get to work or school or wherever he or she needs to go—your household can save more than $1,400 worth of gas in a single year.

Public transportation usage saves the equivalent of 300,000 automobile fill-ups every single day.

You can’t make gasoline on the roof of your house, but you can make electricity on the roof of your house. And that electricity can power your house and it can power your car.

Imagine getting free gasoline for the rest of your life. That’s what it’s like when you charge your electric car with your own solar energy. While there is a cost to install the solar panels and for the battery system, once it’s in, you essentially get all that energy for free!

According to the Bureau of Transportation Statistics, the average American drives 29 miles per day—well within the range of an electric vehicle.

Some people actually consider 1900 to be the heyday of the electric car. At the time, 28 percent of the roughly 4,200 cars produced in the United States were powered by electricity!

Most automobiles get better gas