Many Christians sacrifice a personal pleasure such as chocolate, liquor, or cigarettes to mark Lent, the period of penance and prayer before Easter.
This year, Nina Scott is giving up carbon.
These actions will do little to slow global warming – at most, Scott will probably reduce her “carbon footprint†by 1 or 2 percent during Lent – but she says it’s important to do nonetheless.
It’s been a year since Al Gore’s An Inconvenient Truth packed theaters and won an Oscar. And a good year it has been for the green movement. Venture capital firms poured a record $2.6 billion into clean tech startups in the first three quarters of 2007. Meanwhile, the green buzz has only grown louder. This year, green building construction starts are projected to reach $12 billion. And both Senator Hillary Clinton and Senator Barack Obama have made a greener economy a key plank in their Presidential campaigns.
This guide, entitled “Living the Green Lifeâ€, is meant for real people (with kids, budgets and mortgages) who want to do better by the environment. For the most part, it focuses on lifestyle changes – minor adjustments in daily behavior that may seem inconsequential when one ponders the big picture of global warming. But taken in aggregate, as a nation (when all of us do even one thing), these little lifestyle changes have a huge impact.
