The idea behind the push to conserve energy, is that if you do so, there will be less of a demand of fossil fuels such as coal, oil, and natural gas. A reduced burning of fossil fuels also means lower emissions of fossil fuels and more importantly a reduction of the amount of carbon dioxide that is emitted into our air. Carbon dioxide is the primary offender in the contribution to our global warming crisis.
We have heard it a million times: "we must conserve energy", but as many times as we hear it is our fault for global warming, we are really never told how the little things we do really make a big impact on our environment.
And even better news, very many times it is easy for consumers to chose alternative appliances that conserve energy. Which means that we, the consumer, are now very much so in charge of our own efforts to reduce the effects of global warming.
One average American produces about 40,000 pounds of Carbon Dioxide emissions per year. And in an effort to reduce that number, a list of twenty ways to conserve energy has been released.
In regards to home appliances; turn your refrigerator down! Refrigerators alone make up 20% of total household electricity use. Try to keep the temperature of your refrigerator to as close to 37 degrees as possible, and your freezer as close to 3 degrees as possible.
Also to conserve energy make sure your energy saver switch is always on, and check for any loose connections, you may be loosing precious energy and you don't even know it. When doing your laundry, set your water temperature to cold or warm, never hot. Washing your clothes in hot water would be ideal, but in an effort to conserve energy produced by hot water heaters change it to warm. Millions of products are now catering to this idea too. Many washing detergents are now cold water friendly, so your soap will have the same effect on your clothes, as if you were washing in hot water. Even large corporations are on the band wagon of fighting global warming, you should hop on too!
Next, before you run your dishwasher make sure its full! Also many dishwasher have a 'conserve energy' button that will reduce the amount of energy your appliance uses by almost half. And by opting out of the drying cycle, you can reduce 20% of the total electricity usage for the cycle.
Global Warming is direct result of the excessive energy usage we use daily, so by doing small things around your house can also help in the effort to conserve energy. For instance, turn down your water heaters thermostat.
Make sure that you have it at a consistent temperature, and that you are not requiring it to do extra heating. After all this talk about global warming, you may be asking yourself, what exactly is global warming. Over the past 100 years, the earth's temperature has risen by over one degree Celsius, that may not sound like a lot, but if you ever find yourself asking why we are experiencing such severe storms with greater consistency; global warming is the reason. The earth's surface is getting warmer because our excessive use of energy and emissions of fossil fuels is burning holes in earth's atmosphere; the ozone layer. And without our ozone layer, we can no longer prevent the sun's harmful rays from reaching earth, thus global warming ensues.
There are polar ice caps that are slowly melting, thus creating less and less of a shore line. In fact some scientists hypothesize that if we do not try and conserve energy, we will be in quite a bit of trouble because our effects on the ozone layer will only worsen the effects of the rapidly encroaching problem of global warming.
Global warming is a fast approaching reality, and unless we start to be wise and think of ways we can conserve energy, it will soon become more of a reality than a fear.