New Life- New Beginning

Making change in your life isn’t easy. Not many people like to go out of their way to change something in their life, especially if they think that it doesn’t directly effect them, but the thing is that it does. This was my motivation to change my bad behavior. Not only for myself but for the generations to come. I know that one person wouldn’t make much of a difference in the climate change of the whole world, but regardless it is a great place to start.

The truth is that changing this behavior of mine hasn’t been easy. One of my biggest challenges was to find the time to go out and buy a power strip. Being a college student isn’t easy because I seem to be always busy doing something for my classes or other organizations that I am a part of. Besides that, not all stores have these strips for sale. But once I purchased one of these strips it made everything much easier. Even though it helped a lot, It still wasn’t a complete solution to my problem. I still had to turn off multiple power strips in my room because I have more than one outlet which was an inconvenience. The only complete solution to this behavior would be to have your electrical system re-wired so that there would be one single switch that controls all outlets. But that is even harder than going out and buying a simple power strip and it is certain that not everyone can have that done.

In the end I realized that we can find these kinds of solutions that make things easier for us. But this can only work until one point because at that point, we as humans need to abandon our bad habits and laziness in order to commit to this behavior change. It is important to be able to do this and continue to conserve energy in this way in order to make your first baby step into changing the way our climate is currently headed. No one says it will be easy and that you won’t lift a finger, but the truth of the matter is that the benefits we will be gaining from this behavior change is much larger than and outweighs the cost of our actions and our labour. In the end, when the world is saved, it will all be worth it.

Here is an article that I used for this step to find out how some offices use these power strips in order to conserve energy. A larger amount of people such as an office, will make even a bigger, more positive change:

http://www.nrel.gov/docs/fy13osti/57730.pdf