Green Concerns, Small Steps

I learned with surprise this morning, during an internal global con-call on IT projects, that our compnay is the no. 3 polluter in the Bay area (west coast, USA). For a company with a high commitment to HES (health, environment and safety), this is quite a not-so-good news, if not to say a bit embarrassing. I have not yet made any further checks as to whether it's coming from refinery, oil-gas exploration-prodcution, or other stuffs. More importantly, serious green initiatives are now being undertaken.

Within the energy industry, efforts have been projected toward finding and establishing more on renewable energy. While this would be a future answer to the current sky-rocketing of oil prices, it would also be good energy alternatives that are more environment-friendly. Getohermal energy production has been praised for reducing CO2 footprints as compared to oil and gas mining. Reduction of CO2 footptints shall also be directed toward those manfucturing plants and industrial complex. In this regard, the one that was quite impressive a long time ago while living there was Yokohama in Japan. It was surprisingly clean air amidts a large number of plants operating day-by-day. They were fueled by LNG - liquified natural gas -, a clean energy solution.

What can we do as an individual to help our mother earth sustain our lives ? While some has powerful authority to excercise positive impacts (and need to do so), we can start small steps on our parts. There are stuffs that contribute directly to high emsision or carbons (bad motor exhaust for example) and also those daily "products" we use that the making process are involving carbon emissions or the disposal that would create environmental issue (plastics). Get good care of our cars and bikes as not to pollute our air. Use as approriate, not more than necessary: water, electricity (switch off when we are out of the rooms)... and those computer generated products we use daily. Don't print anything than necessary. A lot more of other stuffs that seems to be small, yet would contribute to the better of our living environment.