Blog Action Day: Climate Change

Today is Blog Action Day, and more than 11,000 bloggers worldwide are participating by posting about the same topic -- climate change.




Day in and day out, the purpose of this blog is to highlight how one seemingly harmless habit -- drinking bottled water -- is having a huge impact on the environment. Americans' choice to consume bottled water leads to the consumption of 17 million barrels of oil annually. We throw away billions of plastic water bottles every year in landfills. Most bottled water is trucked across the country, compounding the environmental impact.

In so many ways, every time you lift a bottle of water to your lips, you're contributing to climate change.

What's the big deal about climate change? The Center for American Progress has a great article on all the things that are being affected by climate change/global warning. There's a long list of things that we'll lose if we don't take steps NOW to control climate change. And consider these facts and figures from the Pew Center on Global Climate Change.

We know that climate change is a complicated issue that can be overwhelming. With a problem as large in scope as climate change, it often feels like there's little that we as individuals can do to make a difference. But we're not powerless. Small changes do matter because they lead to bigger ones. And when individual changes are aggregated, they make a huge difference.

When 30 billion plastic water bottles end up in landfills every year, one family's choice to stop drinking bottled water doesn't really seem that significant. What does it matter that 1,000 fewer water bottles are consumed and thrown away as a result of that family's choice. 1,000 bottles seems is so small in the context of the billions that are consumed and throw away annually.

But that family, fortunately, is not alone in making a change. Every 45 seconds, someone in America switches from bottled water to a water cooler for their home. That saves 400 million bottles from the nation's landfills each year. That's almost half a billion bottles of water, and that's significant.

Small changes do add up, whether it's pledging to break free from bottled water, powering down your electronics when you're not using them, turning off the lights when you leave a room, buying a hybrid car, taking reusable bags to the store, choosing cloth diapers over disposable ones, buying organic produce, consolidating errands, walking or biking to work, replacing the light bulbs in your house with energy efficient ones...

The list of small changes we all can make goes on and on and on.

If we all make climate change a priority, we can make climate change a reality.