engaging in climate change(at school)

How can we as a school community involve ourselves in trying to fix the problem of climate change at our school community?It is very important to our environment and to the earth that we involve ourselves in this climate change issue before its to late.How much greenhouse gases do we use in school?This is something to think about.I think we start off good by using more florescent lights.According to the earth policy institute, if the United States shifted entirely from incandescent to compact fluorescent light bulbs, we could shut down eighty coal-fired (five hundred MW) power plants!Florescent lights are a smart choice to use because they are known to save more energy than regular lightbulbs and even last longer.According to the Union of Concerned Scientists,if every U.S. household replaced just one regular incandescent light bulb with a compact florescent light bulb, it would prevent ninety billion pounds of greenhouse gas emissions from power plants,the equivalent of taking seven point five million cars off the road.We can also save enough energy to light up more than two point five million homes every year! So if we make the change at school, think about how much energy we could be saving! And it would be good for the earth.We can also try our best to all go to school walking or riding our bikes.We save allot of the energy that is needed to take public transportation daily and avoid all the burning carbon emissions going into the air by taking a vehicle.Other ways we can also help the climate go down is by the temperature we have in our classrooms.By keeping our classrooms and schools' thermostat at a temperature of sixty eightdegrees when it is around winter time and seventy eight degrees when it is summer can reduce carbon dioxide emissions too. This way, we can reuduce about two thousand pounds of carbon dioxide a year.Staying informed by taking classes or joining after school activities which involve your time in helping the environment at school can also help with us kids in school to get involved with the earth and become aware of the circumstances that are involved with the climate and enviornmental issues. If we do this, we become more aware of these problems if they are adressed to us in school. Maybe one plan we could have for our school is for the school to have a class on climate change where we discuss the earth's problems and clean parks, make compost.This way, we can be motivated to actually do something about it.An issue i know for a fact we have in school is paper.We take paper for granted, have to write too much notes in all our classes, then in homework. My advice to the students who have computers is too use them as much as possible for all the homeworks and classworks they have and we can also have more computer classes.The average highschool student uses about twenty to thirty pages of paper per week, not including the amount of paper us students use for the notes we use to pass to each other in class! As we know, paper comes from trees and this is an issue because if we use too much, this involves the cutting down and wasting of trees, which is used to absorb most of the carbon dioxide in the air causing climate change.A single tree can absorb one ton of carbon dioxide over its lifetime.This is why it is so important to plant trees and not waste paper in school.So in school, we should have recycle bins in all our classes and only have garbage bins in the lunch room.That way we recycle more.





This is a picture paper and since this is being abused,it is showing how we should recycle paper to help the earth.

resources:


http://environment.about.com/od/greenlivingdesign/a/light_bulbs.htm

http://www.earth-policy.org/plan_b_updates/2007/update66


http://earth911.com/news/2007/04/02/what-can-i-do-to-help-prevent-climate-change/


http://www.fivecentnickel.com/2007/10/15/the-benefits-of-switching-to-compact-fluorescent-light-bulbs/