Save the planet, sell your car!

It seems like every week there is more alarming news emerging about climate change. You can hardly flick over to a news site these days without some story popping up about a new statistic or alarming predicting for the way our planet is headed. And these stories always run with a photo of cracked brown earth or the hot yellow sun that looks like it’s been computer enhanced to emphasize the heat. Or else a polar bear standing on breaking ice, watching their domain vanish, standing and roaring towards the camera and the symbolic perpetrator of this destruction of the earth. I won’t run through the statistics here because we’ve all heard them so many times by now save for the most alarming one, that 97% of the worlds scientists, ie. The people who know what they’re talking about, all accept that climate change is real and that we have to do something about it to avoid catastrophic consequences.

So what can little old you do about it? Well, most people believe that the only real way to avoid something terrible happening to our planet is for the governments of the world to all agree on some regulations and enforce them and that as a species we need to wean ourselves off our reliance on fossil fuels. But there is one way that you can get in on the act.

The personal automobile completely transformed the way we people in moved around in the world when the started to appear in the early part of the twentieth century but today the contribute to a huge amount of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere and many of us drive around when we don’t really need to. Especially those of us who live in cities. Which is a very large percentage of the world’s population. Those of us who own cars in the city really need to consider just how important it is, and whether or not we could get around using the public transport system alone. The problem is that having the car right there is just too tempting. It’s too easy to say oh I can’t be bothered waiting for the tram, let’s just drive. And so we go out onto the roads that are already so overcrowded and we make the problem worse, because another car on the road not only means more emissions from that car but the increased traffic means that all cars spend longer on the road to get through the growing traffic which in turn means that the problem of emissions from all those exhaust pipes is just getting compounded.

Most cities in the developed world have really good transport systems and they will improve if the people demand it, and the best way to demonstrate how much we want it is to use it. but what about those occasions when you want to get out of the city? Well you can rent a car, it’s pretty easy and affordable to find car hire drivenow. So you can organize a trip and have the car for just that time that you need it without having to worry about always keeping your own car parked somewhere and paying the registration and other general upkeep and maintenance costs that really do start to add up after a while. And by not having the car just sitting there at your house you won’t be tempted to drive it everywhere and instead you’ll be out in the world, interacting with people not just locked away inside your little hub. The environment will thank you for your co-operation.