Students find easy way to reduce CO2 emissions

As a sickly smog thickens over cities across the globe and the volume of greenhouse gasses being released into the atmosphere climbs more steeply each year, students at Northville High School have decided to take air quality into their own hands. As a requirement for the school’s AP Environmental Science course, students were asked to go into the community and truly affect change regarding air pollution. The group of classmates I worked with focused on finding a way to reduce greenhouse gasses.

As almost everyone has heard, carbon dioxide (CO2) and methane, two of the top greenhouse gasses, are believed to trap the sun’s heat in the earth’s atmosphere, gradually warming the planet in a phenomenon called climate change. According to the US Environmental Protection Agency, the second largest source of CO2 emissions is the combustion of fossil fuels to transport people and goods, and in 2010, transportation accounted for about 31% of total U.S. CO2 emissions and 26% of total U.S. greenhouse gas emissions.

Obviously transportation caused the release of excess CO2 into the atmosphere, my group discussed, but how could we minimize it? We found our answer in the hundreds of drivers that drove by themselves to school each day. If we could somehow convince these students to carpool, we could reduce the greenhouse gasses being released in our school parking lot each day.

We decided to propose the idea of creating priority parking spots for students who carpool to school. These spots, we hoped, would give students an incentive to carpool by rewarding them for reducing their carbon footprints. After handing out almost 200 surveys we discovered that a whopping 40% of student drivers would be willing to change their driving habits and carpool with other students if priority parking were available. This would increase the percentage of carpooling drivers from 31.9% to 71.3%, decreasing the amount of carbon dioxide emissions by approximately 187,000 pounds per year!

This increase in carpooling would accomplish much more than just reducing the emissions of greenhouse gasses, I soon discovered. In addition to releasing CO2, the exhaust pipes of cars, trucks, and busses across the earth release an excess of gasses like nitrogen dioxide and ozone that contribute to the creation of photochemical smog. This smog is not only harmful to the environment and wildlife; it is detrimental to human health as well. The gasses that make up smog can cause painful lung irritation, trigger asthma attacks, cause difficulties breathing, and even lead to emphysema or other serious respiratory problems.

Working on that air quality project has only strengthened my unshakable belief in the importance of carpooling. The most effective way to reduce greenhouse gasses is to reduce the emissions created by the combustion of fossil fuels, and the easiest way to reduce those emissions is by carpooling. We owe it to the well-being of ourselves, our families, and our earth to jump on the carpooling bandwagon.