Advocacy Project: Household Emissions

For this post I was interested in seeing how many chemicals my car put into the air. I found something better. I found the "Household Emissions Calculator". This calculator asks you a few simple questions about how much energy you use. It takes this information and tells you how much CO2 your activities put into the air. After calculating how much pollution you create, I gives sugestions on how to cut back. It does this by asking if you will cut back on a certain activity and by how much. Not only does it show how much the CO2 level goes down, It shows how much money you could save.

About this Calculator
What I like about this calculator is that it shows how much money you save and give reasonable ways you could reduce your emissions. Something I didn't really like is that it dosen't get into anything really specific. One thing I would have liked to have seen them ask was the year of the car you drive. This would be helpful to know what kind of emissions devices your car has like a catalytic converter.

What I'm Going to do
One thing I'm going to do is star playing less video games and just go for a walk or a bike ride. Anothing thing I will do is drive my motorcycle a lot more than my car. It gets way better gas mileage and pollutes less. For the short trips, I will just ride my bicycle.

One thing I have already been trying to do is buy Energy Star Appliances. I recently bought an Energy Star certified computer.




Overall, I think this is a very useful site to show you how much you activities affect the earth.

Reflection Weeks 11&12

Week 11

This week, we watched the documentary "Unnatural Causes". This showed a city and it's different neighborhoods. It showed the education level of the people living in the areas and their standard of living. It showed that the higher the education, the higher the standard of living usualy is. It was sad to see some of the problems some of the people living in the poorer areas faced.


Week 12

This week, we had Shar as a guest teacher. It was a really fun class and I think she did a great job. I think we had a really interesting discussion about the hole in the ozone closing. After reading chapter 20 in our books, we discussed how the information might not be accurate.

Reflection: Weeks 9& 10

Week 9
This week in class we discussed taking pictures. We talked about the basics of picture taking like how to use your camera, getting the right angle, and watching the background so that a person in the picture dosen't look like they're wearing a hat. something else we discussed was getting permission to use people in your pictures. I confused me a little bit.

Week 10
NO CLASS

Reflection: Weeks 7& 8

Week 7

This week we watched the documentary "Green". This documentary was about an area on the Mississippi river known as "cancer alley". This is a stretch about 100 miles long with many chemical factories located along the river. It showed some of the people living in the area and some of the problems that they face. One of the biggest problems is cancer. This is how the area got its name.

Week 8

This week we watched the documentaty "Thirst". I was gone for the first day of the video, and the second day didn't go so well either. What I did see is that this video focused on the privitization of water. It also showed that people are trying to treat water as more of an asset that a right to life.

Eye Opener: Environmental Working Group

The product that I use is Crest Fluoride anticavity toothpaste, whitening plus scope extreme.

Ingredients in this product are linked to:
Cancer
Developmental/reproductive toxicity
Violations, restrictions & warnings
Allergies/immunotoxicity

I found this very surprising. I wouldn't have ever guessed that there would be chemicals linked to cancer in my toothpaste. I looked at the list of chemicals in this product and some of them were rated at a 9 out of 10. Even with these chemicals, my toothpaste was still only a 5 out of 10 on the scale. It's hard to imagine what's in the products that are rated a 10. Something else I find scary is the the warning on the lable says "Keep out of reach of children under 6 years of age". This is the stuff we're putting in our mouths. It also says that if you swallow more than what you use for brushing, you should contact poison control. Can't we find something better to clean our teeth? I think that I will probably use this site for some research before I buy any new cosmetic products.

Reflection: Weeks 13& 14

Week 13

On tuesday, we watch a little video called "The Story of Stuff". It had a lot of information for such a short video. It showed the cycle of goods being produced and who it affects along the way. On thursday, we had our walk through Bagley. It was really fun actualy learning how to use a compass. There was a lot more to it than I thought.

Week 14

This week, we did a fun activity. Dr.V had a bunch of objects, and we had to think of a bunch of different uses for them. We realized that preaty much everything can be used for a candle holder and a candy dish.

Advocacy Project: Healthy People/ THOMAS

Goal: Promote health for all through a healthy environment.

Sub-goal: 8-3 Improve the nations air quality by increasing the use of cleaner alternative fuels.

Target: 8%

Baseline: Cleaner alternative fuels represented 0.8 percent of U.S. motor fuel consumption in 1997

Target setting method: 10-fold improvement.

Related Bill: H.R.1787