But What Can I Do About Climate Change?

No, you can not fix climate change all by yourself. If you change what you do that is making climate change worse it can help to stop climate change. A lot of people all doing as much as they can about climate change is what it takes to fix our climate change problems

Climate change is happening so fast that we need to do as much as we can as fast as we can. If we don't do that, we are toast.

Your personal part of this solution is to change how you live so that your part of the problem becomes a solution. You can learn how to live so that your carbon footprint is as small as possible. If enough of us do this we can reduce the carbon in our air to low enough levels to start reversing climate change.

The biggest thing you can do lower your carbon footprint is to stop using fossil fuels. Fossil fuels are gas, oil and coal. If your heating and cooking in your home depend on fossil fuels, you can find ways to reduce or stop using them.

One easy way to begin this process is to make sure your home uses as little energy as possible to keep you warm. Lower your thermostat. You can wear warmer clothes to stay comfortable. You can do things to make your home more energy efficient as well. All of these things will save you money as well as help save our planet.

Moving ourselves and our things around costs a lot of money and is even more costly for what it does to climate change.
We need to get off of our dependence on guzzling a lot of fuel to get around. We should be walking, biking, and using public transport.

You will have to get used to walking, biking, and using public transport as gas and oil prices rise due to their increasing scarcity, anyway. You might as well start a little early and save some money.

You can save up your gasoline money and use it to buy a good bike or a solar system for your home. They have dropped prices on solar energy equipment lately, so you can get your own more easily now.

You can reuse and recycle more than you have in the past. They have an amazing array of blogs devoted to making useful things out of things we are used to throwing away. 

You can start working on keeping your own usable discards out of the local landfill. Freecycle is the name of an international organization dedicated to helping you with that. You sign up to get on a freecycle email list for your area. They send you lists of items people are offering with a contact email to arrange a pickup for the item offered.

If you want an item that is offered, you email them and ask if it is still available. They let you know if it is still available for you. Then you arrange where and when to pick up the item(s).

If you want to offer an item, you write a post to the local freecycle group and the moderators either tell you to correct it, or they post it.

Many thrift stores and charities will come to your home to pick up items that you wish to donate to them. I have found one that I like a lot and am on their regular route. 

Some of the things that I recycle and reuse are my no longer used clothing and other fabric items like old sheets. My current project of this sort is curtains. I live up near the Arctic. That means that during the summer we have very long days. There are few hours of darkness. This can make it harder to sleep because of all the light in the bedroom.

I am layering some of my old fabric discards into curtains thick enough to block light from my windows. Light blocking curtains are ridiculously expensive and the fabric to block light is not a lot better. Putting several layers of fabric stacked in between the curtain fabric and the lining does not show and look ugly, but it can block out the light.

My windows need at least four layers of fabric to block the light well. If you want your curtains to look pretty and full they need to be three to four times the width of your window. 

Two extra layers of fabric between the lining and the curtain material is a lot more fabric. I am running through a lot of old sheets, pillowcases and clothing. This is a much more satisfactory use for them.

I plan to post in more detail on how to make hats and vests, etc. to stay warm when you lower your thermostat. 

Stay warm and save the earth!