How Can Individuals Get Involved

      

Many citizens of the world under estimate what climate change can do and they just push it to the side and focus on what they think are the important issues such as global poverty. Although, global poverty is a big issue, we should not try to avoid climate change because it can cause a lot of damage to people that are not expecting it. Take Washington for an example, they can be considered as one of the unexpected places to be hit by climate change. Everything was relatively normal with Washington until they got a drastic change in their climate which leads to a rise in the sea level, which leads to more floods. You may ask “What can I do as an individual to help with this issue and wouldn’t it cost a lot of money to try to tackle this issue?” well, facts show that it is not as expansive as people for take it to be. The reason it is not as expensive is because there are lots of little thing that occur in our everyday lives that we can do to play a role in helping stop climate change. We could do something as simple as turning of the lights when you leave a room, taking your bike instead of a car or putting your garbage in the right container. When you are leaving a room and you don't turn off the lights, you will not only get a high electrical bill, you would be considered one of the many people who are contributing to climate change. The reason not turning the lights effects climate change is because the majority of people in the world get there energy from fossil fuels and when you do so it releases too much CO2 into the air where it is trapped by the atmosphere. When this happens, and the CO2 heats up the earth, this will lead to changes in the climate. By taking your bike instead of a car, you are actually stopping CO2 from getting out and heating up the earth. As it stands right now, transportation causes around twenty five percent of all greenhouse gas emissions, so if we can limit our transportation time we would be doing the world a big favor. After you are done with you garbage if you can take the extra two seconds and put it in the right garbage can, it will eventually start to add up, and make a difference. Similar to transportation, Buried garbage such as paper or plastic produce methane which contributes to about eighteen percent of all greenhouse gas emissions. So in the end, if even half the people in the world could do these harmless events we could be that much closer to helping stop climate change.