Live in Cities -- They are the greenest places

Believe it or not, city-living is relatively green -- all things considered. A common misconception about city-living is that it is the source of all things toxic that linger up into our carbonic atmosphere, which in turn deplete our big floating oceanic ice cubes.
In cities, 65% of the population walk, bike, or ride mass transit to work; as for the other 35%, they drive cars. This rate of car ownership in the cities is in fact, amongst the lowest in the country. Being that automobile exhaust is one of the leading contributors to atmospheric pollutants (approximately 1.9 billion tons a year just in the U.S. -- more than that of India, Japan, or Russia), reducing the amount of cars in the cities drastically reduces emissions. For instance, in the city of Manhattan where very few people own cars, the average carbon footprint of a Manhattanite is 30% lower than that of the average U.S. citizen. Manhatten, therefore, is quite possibly the greenest place in the United States.
Furthermore, the lifestyle in a city is much less demanding on mother nature. High speed forms of transportation emit the least amount of pollutants amongst trains, planes and automobiles. Believe it or not, the elevator has been a very key invention to green living. The elevator has enabled an abundance of people to snuggle up into one large building and live as closely-networked neighbors. With this new vertical lifestyle stretching many stories up into the sky, everybody benefits off of everyone else, including their energy usage (such as air conditioning or heating). This provides for a much more efficient way of living.
In suburban areas, from the rolling hills to the rolling waves of isolated rivers, energy usage is actually quite astoundingly prolific. Just merely cutting your lawn emits hazardous amounts of pollutants into the atmosphere; of the 40 million lawn mowers used in the U.S. to beautify the surrounding greenery, each one emits the equivalent of 11 cars worth of pollutants every hour. Now think, many people do have large lawns and do take about an hour to cut the lawn. All these pollutants adversely affect our atmosphere. In the suburbs, many people own cars on top of their already large amount of 11 cars crammed into a mechanized beast some call a lawn mower. After a long hot hour of cutting the lawn, some may feel the sudden desire to cool off at the beach located half an hour away. This whole scenario lends itself to a party of excited little gas molecules heating up the environmental scene.
So, if you plan on living a greener lifestyle, before you go out and buy a hybrid car, and a set of solar panels for your house, perhaps you should consider selling your car and moving into the urban way of life.

A/C -- Environmentally Friendly?

The air conditioning is one of the most common pieces of machinery found within a typical American household. The a/c is so prolific that, believe it or not, it ranks nearly second to cars in energy usage.

Oh how good it feels to walk into a nice cool house after spending hours in the hot humid sea, that some venture to call the 'air'. When you walk into that cool house, you are the epitome of an energy sucking carbon Bigfoot beast.

Well, it depends how you look at it -- I suppose. By walking into an air conditioned home in the south, you are actually doing less harm on mother nature than the northerners walking into their cosy dwellings filled with warmth.

Did you know that if it is freezing cold outside, and you have to heat up your house, you are actually using a LOT more energy than if you had to cool your house on a hot summers day. It is official that the amount of carbon dioxide released in heating homes exceeds that of cooling them.

Looking at this from a physics perspective: air molecules have to be heated and excited to generate kinetic energy, and thus heat; this requires adding energy to the system and offsetting the equilibrium. In cooling, you actually take heat away from an object, which is much easier to do, being that heat (high kinetic energy) always flows to cooler places (low kinetic energy).

The difference is actually quite staggering. In a typical household in the northeast, 13,000 lbs. of CO2 is emitted in order to heat the house by fuel oil. In the south, say Phoenix for instance, only 900 lbs. of CO2 is emitted to cool a similar dwelling. Too heat a certain volume of space requires on average eight times more energy than to cool the same amount of space!

With all that said, it comes with great ease, the realization that heating a house is, in fact, highly detrimental to the planet. So next time before you turn on your heating, think twice, and maybe just layer up your clothing a bit more. You can help the environment by consciously making the change to green living!