Eco-Challenge: Reduce your carbon footprint

As part of our commitment to Earth via our Laudato Si’ Action Plan, we are inviting everyone who shares in our charism to take a monthly Eco-Challenge with us.

What is a “carbon footprint?”

You may be asking what even is a “carbon footprint” and why do I need to reduce it? A carbon footprint is the sum of all the greenhouse gas emissions that are produced as byproducts of an activity or the manufacturing and transportation of goods.

As the Catholic Climate Covenant writes, “Your carbon footprint is the amount of carbon dioxide and other greenhouse gases produced by activities you engage in. This includes the emissions emitted directly into the atmosphere, like when you drive a car or fly on an airplane. However, your carbon footprint also includes indirect emissions. These come from activities like heating your home, which may use electricity produced by a coal-burning power plant, and even the food you eat, which is linked to greenhouse gas emissions when it is grown, processed, and transported to the supermarket.”

According to Mike Berners-Lee, a professor at Lancaster University in the UK and author of The Carbon Footprint of Everything, the average person living in the United States has a carbon footprint around three times as high as the average global citizen.

While natural factors can also affect the warming of the Earth, the United States Environmental Protection Agency points to “multiple lines of evidence [which] confirm that human activities are the primary cause of the global warming since the start of the 20^th century.” These emissions are not without consequence. Greenhouse gases trap heat in the atmosphere, altering climate and weather patterns. Beyond hotter temperatures and more severe storms, the United Nations say greenhouse gas emissions and global warming can lead to increased drought, warmer and rising oceans, loss of species, food scarcity, more health risks, poverty and displacement.

There are ways to reduce your carbon footprint. Large and small lifestyle changes, from the way we eat to the way we travel, can impact the size of our carbon footprint. The Catholic Climate Covenant writes, “Ultimately, each of us—particularly in wealthy nations—must work to reduce our carbon footprints through lifestyle changes…For people of faith, these changes also mean taking on new attitudes, grounded in an acknowledgement that the world’s abundant but finite resources are meant for all of God’s people, not just those in wealthier nations, and meant to be cared for as part of God’s creation.”

Tips for reducing your carbon footprint:

• Try to fly nonstop when you take a flight as the most gas is used when landing and taking off.
• While driving your car maintain a smooth, even speed as the most gas is used while accelerating and braking.
• Use public transportation, a bicycle, or carpool places when possible.
• Eat less meat as raising cows and other animals for consumption produces a lot of greenhouse gases.
• Eat more local vegetables that are in season. Eat more grains and other plant-based proteins.
• Stop using disposable paper and plastic dishes, bottles, and other containers. Instead commit to using re-usable water bottles to dishes and utensils, and other food containers.
• Check to see if your state or city offers energy choices to choose a power plan that uses renewable/green energy sources.
• Update to certified EnergyStar appliances when possible. These types of appliances are efficient and use less energy.

Carbon offsets

In addition to reducing your carbon footprint, you can also ‘offset’ your carbon footprint. The Catholic Climate Covenant explains, “Carbon offsets are one type of temporary solution for our enormous carbon footprints, especially for those emissions that we can’t directly reduce. In this approach, you “offset” your carbon footprint by financing an activity that removes greenhouses gases from the atmosphere, or at least reduces what would have otherwise been emitted.”

An easy way to start offsetting is to offset all of your extended travel/vacations. We’ve partnered with Catholic Climate Action Projects to offer a way for people to contribute to our Trees for Tacna project. On the Catholic Climate Action Projects’ website, you can calculate your carbon footprint for various trips you take or other ways you use fossil fuels. It will then suggest a donation amount to offset this carbon expenditure. Although not a carbon offset in the most legalistic sense of the word, this program grows trees that over time will pull carbon from the atmosphere.

These two websites can also assist you with carbon offsetting:

The Catholic Climate Covenant also reminds us that carbon offsets are not long-term solutions. “They are only a stopgap measure, and after we’ve done as much as we can to reduce our emissions, we can use them in good conscience while we try to solve the actual problem—producing those greenhouse gases in the first place. In other words, they should not be used instead of long-term solutions, which decrease emissions at the source, but rather alongside them!” Furthermore, work to reduce our personal carbon footprints should also be accompanied by advocating for policies that encourage large companies, who are behind the vast majority of greenhouse gas emissions, to tackle their own carbon footprints and investigate more sustainable practices.

Season of Creation

The Season of Creation is the annual Christian celebration to pray and respond together to the cry of Creation: the ecumenical family around the world unites to listen and care for our common home. It begins on September 1, World Day of Prayer for the Care of Creation, and continues through October 4, the Feast of St Francis. This year’s theme is “To Hope and Act with Creation.” It’s an especially good month to challenge yourself to make changes to help the Earth.

“Faith is a gift, the fruit of the Spirit’s presence in us, but it is also a task to be undertaken freely, in obedience to Jesus’ commandment of love. Such is the blessed hope to which we must bear witness. Yet where, when, and how are we to bear that witness? Surely by caring for the flesh of suffering humanity. As people who dare to dream, we must dream with our eyes wide open, impelled by a desire for love, fraternity, friendship and justice for all. Christian salvation enters into the depths of the world’s suffering, which embraces not only humanity but also the entire universe, nature itself, and the oikos, the home and living environment of humanity.”

Pope Francis

Take the Eco-Challenge

How many of these actions will you take this month?