Air pollution notes

Notable facts:

- Air pollution is the introduction of chemicals, particulates, and biological matter into the atmosphere that cause harm to living organisms or damage the natural environment.

- Air pollution has become so great that Earth's natural cleaning process is inadequate to fully cleanse itself.

- The biggest contributing factor to air pollution is the burning of fossil fuels.  It's a part of nearly every human's life.

- China leads the world in air pollution emissions.

What you can do...

Driving:

- Take public transportation as frequently as possible.

- If you do drive, plan all your stops so they coincide with your trip.

- Ease into acceleration. Gunning it burns much more fuel.

Home:

- Use less warm water.  Wash clothes on cold settings, wash your dishes with cool water.  Warming water is very expensive in energy consumption.

- Turn off your lights when you don't need them.

- If your power company supports renewable energy, find out how you can consume and encourage renewable energy.  Rocky Mountain Power provides customer's with the option to buy into their Blue Sky Renewable Energy Program. The blue sky program uses renewable energies such as wind farms and solar power instead of abrasive energies like burning fossil fuels.

- Reduce your lawn size. Having less lawn that needs to be weekly maintained with watering and mowing will do a great deal.

- Don't have more than two children.  The biggest contributor to air pollution is man.  Every single person contributes a great amount to the problem.

Proposed Efforts:

- Klaus Lackner at Columbia University devised a system called Air Capture that uses membranes that bind CO2.  They are sometimes referred to as "artificial tree" because they do the job of a tree by breaking down CO2, only artificially  do it 1000 times more efficiently.