How can people in B.C. reduce their effect on climate change?

Part 1

Before I start discussing what you can do about climate change I want to first talk about what climate change is and how we know humans are causing it. Climate change is the gradual rising temperature of the earth primarily due to the increasing greenhouse gasses, such as carbon dioxide, methane and nitrous oxide. These gasses cause the earth to retain more heat than normal. This is causing water levels to rise and sea ice to melt.

Now how do we know we are the cause. Since the industrial revolution, the amount of carbon dioxide in the air has increased by 40 %. This is definitely not just a coincidence with the earth realizing more carbon dioxide at the same time the industrial revolution. In fact since 1870  human activity such as deforestation and use of fossil fuels, are activities have put 2,000 gigatons of carbon dioxide in the air. Because of this, the earth’s temperature is rising at about 10 times that at the end of an ice age.

B.C. produces the 5^th most greenhouses of any if the provinces. There are many ways that each person could do better to help reduce the number of greenhouse gasses released into the atmosphere. In my opinion, the best way to do this in to try to reduce the greenhouse gas emissions in the biggest section. In the case of B.C, this would be Transportation, such as cars and trucks.

I know cars are needed for many parts of our day to day life, but they produce the largest part of our carbon emissions. There are many ways to that you could reduce their emissions. The first way, would be to use an electric or hybrid car, this altho it would reduce carbon emissions these vehicles are expensive and even tho in bc you use primarily hydropower, but up to 10% is not and the dams still required manganese work and these vehicles are expensive. So some other options would be to when possible either walk or ride a bike. If these aren’t an option due to either weather or distance you can carpool but don’t go too out of your way, another option is to take the bus but the schedules sometimes don’t work out at all.

Since a lot of stuff is already about reducing the number of greenhouse gasses released by vehicles, I want to talk much about it, but since it is the biggest emitter I felt like it needed to be discussed at least a little.  Something that produces a good amount of methane, which retains 20 times more heat than carbon dioxide, landfills. As for stuff in landfills decomposes it releases consistent methane over the course of several decades. unfortunately, the amount of waste we produce, according to a 2013 study the amount of waste we produce is set to triple to 12 million tons each day worldwide by 2100. The only real way that you could reduce the number of things we throw into the garbage. For example, if you have an empty can don’t just throw it in the garbage wait until you see a recycling bin, you could also bring reusable bags when you go shopping, this one will also save you a bit of money.

A final huge thing we can do Is reducing the amount of meat we eat as globally raising livestock produces as much greenhouse gases as transportation, which as you might remember in B.C. transportation the biggest emitter of greenhouse gases. Interestingly in the currently we are actually eating on average 20% less beef than 15 years ago. Due to this, there are 185 million metric tones of carbon released into the atmosphere then there would have been otherwise.

Part 2

During this blog, I have been putting to use the things we learned about info fluency, such as to ask small questions in order to help answer our larger question such as what is climate change? How do we know we are causing it? These two questions don’t have as much to do with the main questions I am trying to answer. But I feel that this is something important to add as during the past few years it has become clear that many people don’t believe climate change is real or that humans are causing it.

What areas produce the greenhouse gasses? How does waste disposal affect climate change? What industries produce the most greenhouse gasses? These questions are more on the topic than the others. As you can see by the questions I feel that if you try to remove the easier and smaller things, yes it will help, but not as much if everyone tries to remove the bigger things from our day to day lives. Even you aren’t 100% successful it will still help.

During the briefing of this, I attempted to use a new way of gathering information that I have never used before, Gale, but unfortunately I found it Harder to find relevant information, I am not saying that it was not there I just found it harder to find, and the information less prevalent in many sections. About halfway through this assignment, Gale started requesting a password so I was unable to use it.

The proses I used was a lot of taking the information I used and looking to see what information I could gain that wasn’t necessarily written and finding what information wasn’t nearly there but when combined with what I already know I can then use this to help answer my question.

To verify the information I found I used a lot of intuition on the information and the site. I looked at the information and If I saw something that wasn’t quite right for example, there where no situations at the bottom of the page, or the page was covered with adds, or the information was clearly one-sided, I would be really cautious with the information.

During this proses, I think I could have come up with some better questions to have asked. Overall I think this was a good assignment and I believe If I were to do this again that is the main thing I think I would change as if you don’t have good questions to ask you won’t find the best information.

Sources:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ffjIyms1BX4

http://www.env.gov.bc.ca/soe/indicators/sustainability/ghg-emissions.html

https://www.worldatlas.com/articles/green-house-gas-emissions-by-canadian-province-and-territory.html

http://www.discovery.com/dscovrd/nature/how-your-trash-is-impacting-climate-change/

https://www.bchydro.com/energy-in-bc/operations/generation.html