1. change a light, replacing one regular light(bulb) with a compact fluroscent bulb will save 150 pounds of carbon dioxide a year.

2. check your tires, keeping your car tires inflated properly can improve gas mileage by more than 3%.

3. every gallon of gasoline saved keeps 20 pounds of carbon dioxide out of the atmosphere.

4. avoid products with lot of packaging, you can save 1200 pounds of carbon dioxide if you cut down your garbage by 10%.

5. plant a tree, a single tree will absorb one ton of carbon dioxide in its lifetime.

6. turn off electronic devices, simply turning off your television, dvd player, stereo and computer when you are not using them will save you thousands of pounds of carbon dioxide a year.

do you have such things to add !!

Which it then releases again when it dies.

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But adds mercury to the environment if the bulb breaks or is not recycled properly (something most folks either don't realize or don't have access to the necessary infrastructure to do.)

It's a trade-off. I can't recycle these bulbs from here, and fluorescent bulbs cause me other forms of grief, so I'm sticking with my own stock of incandescents for now. A better option will turn up sooner or later.

Tell that to retailers who insist upon wrapping everything in layers of clamshell packaging MacGuyver couldn't get open with the Jaws of Life and explosives he mixed from old bubble gum, and something labeled 1997 he found growing in the back of some fridge.

The most important thing you can do to help the environment is to support modern nuclear energy and research into improved fission and ultimately, fusion reactors.

Brian Dunning had a very good Skeptico podcast episode on that subject on the... hmm... 19th? Well worth listening to.

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But there is a lot more carbon emission in the manufacture of the compact fluorescent. Also the life of the com fl is substantially shortened by turning it on and off. So for infrequently/briefly used bulbs, incandescent can be better.
You'll save a lot more gas/petrol simply by choosing a car that is designed to be efficient. You don't have to go to the extremes of buying an electric/hybrid, merely staying away from SUVs and sports cars does a lot. Saves you money too. It is worth spending at least $1000 or so more on a new vehicle that uses 10% less fuel (very rough order of magnitude estimate at typical ranges of fuel consumption).

Ride a bicycle or walk for short trips.

Get used to living at a lower temp in the winter (say 20 rather than 25, thats 70 rather than 80 in Frankenstein) and don't bother with aircon - you can get used to doing without it - or use it more sparingly.
Insulate your house. Very well.
Fit individual thermostatic valves to radiators and turn down the temp in infrequently used rooms. Use a timer switch to turn off the heating when you are out.

Have subdued lighting in your house with localised brighter patches for where you need to see detail.

Eat more veg and less meat.

Don't buy so much stuff, you don't need it all.

etc, etc.

You'll save a lot more gas/petrol simply by choosing a car that is designed to be efficient. You don't have to go to the extremes of buying an electric/hybrid, merely staying away from SUVs and sports cars does a lot. Saves you money too. It is worth spending at least $1000 or so more on a new vehicle that uses 10% less fuel (very rough order of magnitude estimate at typical ranges of fuel consumption).

I believe it's better to buy the vehicle that's appropriate to your needs - not too big and not too small. If all you do is drive by yourself to and from work than any small car, motorcycle, or even a bicycle is often the best choice. On the other hand, if you need to carry large numbers of people on a regular basis and/or haul heavy stuff (construction equipment) than a big pickup or SUV may be the best choice.

I believe it's better to have one vehicle that meets most or all of your needs than to have two vehicles. The energy and resources consumed to build that second vehicle may well be far greater than what you'd save by having a big vehicle for some needs and a small one for daily driving. The other alternative is to rent the bigger vehicle only when you need its capabilities and stick to the most efficient smaller vehicle that can handle your local climate.

Living in Colorado, I need a vehicle that can handle bad weather (like the icy roads we're experiencing this morning or the snow we had last Sunday). An all wheel drive vehicle like my Honda CR/V does quite well in bad weather, gets over 25 MPG in my daily driving, and is big enough to carry my grandkids or other stuff in the back. It seems to be the best overall vehicle to meet my needs. Now, if the Chevy Volt comes out in a few years for a reasonable price and can handle bad weather, I'll be very tempted to buy one. My 7 year old CR/V might be up for replacement about then.

You tend to save that again on insurance premiums as well.

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A new miracle technique, we apply homeopathic methods to achieve scientific efficaciousness
for dilutions WAY beyond Avogadro's Limit. It's New! It's Fresh!
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The best vehicle in weather (assuming I could get it started), ice, and snow I've ever had was a '93 Topaz. It was more like a snowmobile than a car. It's more about the tires and the driving than how many wheels are involved in pulling.

There are weather situations where I trust my Corolla far more than I'd trust a 4wd Suburban (although I've seen them do some very impressive things in deep snow.)

If it's bad enough that they're not plowing the roads at all, it's bad enough to stay home. Short of that, 2wd cars with the right tires and sensible drivers get the job done as well as anything else on the road.

Not trying to give you a hard time on this, just saying it's not the CR/V that's keeping you safe. It's you. And your tires.

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New! It combines the power of science with the gentleness of your mother's best intentions!
A new miracle technique, we apply homeopathic methods to achieve scientific efficaciousness
for dilutions WAY beyond Avogadro's Limit. It's New! It's Fresh!
It's Placebo^[tm] Brand Power Drink! *[Use as directed. May increase kidney function.]

Advising people to focus on their choice of vehicle is all well and good, but the OP's suggestion of maintaining good tire pressure to save gas is applicable to all vehicles, be they a Hummer or a Prius.

If it's bad enough that they're not plowing the roads at all, it's bad enough to stay home. Short of that, 2wd cars with the right tires and sensible drivers get the job done as well as anything else on the road.

Not trying to give you a hard time on this, just saying it's not the CR/V that's keeping you safe. It's you. And your tires.

I've lived here for 22 years and only had an all-wheel drive vehicle for the last 7. One of the big factors for how well a vehicle handles snow is, IMO, ground clearance. When I first moved here, I had a 4 door Honda Civic. It was front wheel drive and had good tires but was easy to get stuck because the ground clearance was so low.

Our winters here where I live aren't really severe, they're just long. We had far more snow last year than we've had for most of the years I've lived here. My CR/V, gutless wonder that it is, handled snow up to a foot deep very well. There weren't many two wheel drive cars on the road under those conditions.

I have to disagree a bit. My wife and I own three vehicles. It used to be four, but her commuter car (Honda Civic) was totalled and we haven't replaced it yet.

By far the most controversial of the three is the 1998 Nissan Pathfinder. This thing is a gas hog and really has no right to be so. It isn't all that big and it isn't all that powerful. But it sucks gas like there's no tomorrow. Why do we have it? Because, in 1998 I needed a 4-wheel drive vehicle and this was the best choice. Since that year, it's mainly just sat in the driveway, ready for road trips for which it's suited. It has less than 90,000 miles on it, despite being 10 years old. And we put 20,000 miles on it in 1998 (it definitely got used).

But I'm not selling it. There's no point. I can afford the insurance and the registration fees and it very occasionally fills a need. It isn't contributing much to environmental damage any more, like it did when it was used heavily and when it was built.

For day-to-day driving, both of us use smaller, more fuel efficient cars (at least when the Honda was still with us and it's fuel efficient replacement will be arriving shortly). The fourth vehicle? A 1989 Toyota pickup with about 210,000 miles on it. Great for the occasional hauling duty. Not selling that either, although I regularly get asked. It was my daily driver until a few years ago.

So why would it be better to get rid of my extra vehicles? To the extent they are used, they keep miles off the daily cars, which makes them last longer. We only drive so much - having additional cars doesn't put more pollutants in the air or burn more gas. It just spreads those things out over more vehicles.

The best way to save the environment is to put fewer people into it.

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*shrug* 19 years, all of it in snow country, and one more storm will put us past our fifth cumulative meter of snowfall since November. (6 storms like the one I've linked above, and dozens of smaller storms. No exaggeration.)

My boss and roughly half my coworkers think I'm a bit crazy for the weather I'm comfortable with. (I do have self-imposed limits, but it's usually visibility-related because I'm prone to snow-blindness.) But, and more relevantly, I do see mostly 2WD cars on the roads in these conditions. Snow doesn't slow us down all that much.

Ground clearance is useful in deep snow, but again, if the weather isn't so bad that they've stopped plowing entirely, you should never see that on a road system in snow country (although I do, sometimes, in my subdivision. We're just about last on the plow's schedule.) If it is that bad that there's actual accumulation, one should not be driving at all.

I've had the Topaz in foot+ snow (mostly parking lots, but once on an unplowed back road on a trip I could not wave off as much as I wanted to) many times without any trouble at all. The Corolla I'm driving now won't do what the Topaz did, but it's capable enough under most conditions you'll see in NB.

But except for really extreme snow areas, the real concern for 99.95+% of all drivers, anywhere, comes down to traction and sensible driving. All else being equal, small cars and small SUVs will outlast the big monster SUVs on icy conditions. AWD, 4WD, 2WD doesn't play all that much of a factor here.

Anyways, I wasn't planning to hijack the thread outright, and I'm a bit sick of winter as it is. Larry, can we postpone this until next autumn or something?

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A new miracle technique, we apply homeopathic methods to achieve scientific efficaciousness
for dilutions WAY beyond Avogadro's Limit. It's New! It's Fresh!
It's Placebo^[tm] Brand Power Drink! *[Use as directed. May increase kidney function.]

I've held that belief for a long time. When I express it, I usually get evil stares from those with small children.

Very good advice, Suntil. Thank you.

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Man, the wet blanket effect here! (Don't listen to the tired cynics, suntrack)

Ah, mercury. It took me a long time (at least 45 seconds) to dig up a primer on mercury. From my old favorite Popular Mechanics, no less.
http://www.popularmechanics.com/blog...s/4217864.html
(Nevermind that people have been ditching fluorescent tubes for many decades, suddenly it's a Major Obstacle. Downright terrifying, in fact. I'm shivering like... a pool of mercury!)

Note that mercury is emitted by burning coal. Well, sure, traces of everything are everywhere. But the net mercury put into circulation is much less when fluorescents are used. Plus, it isn't being volatilized at high temperature and pumped up a several hundred foot high smokestack to spread over the countryside.

My own guess is that the compact fluorescent is an interim solution, on the way to light emitting diode illumination or the like. But compact disks have served well between magnetic tape and mass solid-state storage.

And I agree, saving 3% on top of any other savings is STILL 3%. Try to get a certificate of deposit right now paying 3%. Many businesses LIVE on a 3% margin.

You also mentioned planting a tree to sequester CO2. Henrik replied:
Now, come on, that is only true in a nonstatistical manner. Any single tree is like a single coin flip, agreed. But with the planetwide net deforestation of the last few centuries, planting enough trees to tip the scales back to increased forestation might make an impact.

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