1 lb co2/ gallon

"Imagine you are driving in your car and every mile you drive you throw a pound of trash out your window. And everyone else on the freeway in their cars are doing the exact same thing, and the people driving Hummers are throwing two bags out at a time.."

Nate Lewis from the California Institute of Technology says in Tom Friedman's book "Hot, Flat, and Crowded"

Sounds ridiculous doesn't it? Can't you just imagine the thousands of trash bags on the side of the road? Well, according to Nate Lewis, that's what we already are doing.

But we aren't throwing out a pound of trash, we are throwing out a pound of carbon dioxide into the atmosphere.

On the way home today that's all I could think about. I watched the mileage ticker number get bigger and thought of the trash.

I don't know about you, but that makes me want to drive less than I do.

If you think about how much 100 pounds of carbon dioxide is a lot, I'm throwing at like 5 times that every year, at least. It is no surprise that global warm is happening rapidly.

When you think about the fact that more and more people are driving every year as more people can afford cars in developing countries, the amount of co2 going into the atmosphere is increasing every year.

So what's it going to be people? Can we pull it together and find finding better ways of getting around? It's really up to us.