Walk? I’d rather drive.

After completing the Carbon Footprint Calculator exercises  I noticed a few things.  I noticed that in relativity to many other U.S. homes, my family does not produce as many gas emissions as the others.  According to the natural averages my household produces twenty five tons of carbon dioxide equivalent per year while the average household produces twenty seven tons of carbon dioxide equivalent per year.  The second thing that I realized during the exercises is that driving and flying made up the majority of my annual behavior breakdown chart.  The fact under that is that I rarely fly, therefore it is apparent that I drive too much.

The reason that I named this post “Walk? I’d rather Drive” is because those are my exact words every time I consider walking somewhere.  All Lafayette students and faculty know that Lafayette is a “walking campus”.  That is never the case for me.  I have a car and I take serious advantage of it by driving whenever I can.  This is a habit that I must break.  Every day I drive to football practice when I could easily walk, but I never do because I know that I will dread walking back after a long, exhausting practice.  This whole idea of having a car has shifted my mindset from just driving down to football practice, all the way up to literally driving whenever I can.  If I know I will not get a ticket, I even drive to my classes.

The Carbon Footprint Calculator said that we would need 4.8 Earths to have enough resources  to provide the Earth if everyone lived the way I do.  There are many people’s homes that are worse than mine, but mine can still be better.  I will personally work on improving my home’s impact on the footprint by reducing how often I drive.  My goal is to greatly lessen how often I drive.  The only time I want to drive is when I am going to football practice daily.  Besides that I want to keep driving to the absolute minimum, especially when I am on campus.  If I reach my goal I believe it will be a great contribution of my part towards helping the environment.