Sustainable Transportation: Part I

Did you know that transportation is responsible for 22% of all CO2 emmissions? Carbon dioxide may be just one of many gases, but it should give you an idea of the percentage of other gases emmited by transportation-- including the dangerous nitrogen oxides and ozone.
Because transportation has such a heavy impact on our environment, we need to adjust this practice drastically. Here are some of my suggestions:

• Don't commute by car! I know, some of you (feel that you) must commute, because you live such a long way away from the place that you work. But that is no excuse, really. Find a job close to home, or find a home close to your job. If neither of these appeal to you, take the bus or find someone who is driving along the same route so that you can carpool.
• Make it a rule: whenever you are going somewhere "for fun", like the movies or to a friend's house, rule out the car and bike, walk, or take public transit.
• If you have a car, give it to someone going car-shopping. Or use it as a carpool car.
• Long distance trips should be made by train and charter bus. That includes summer vacation-- imagine the rustic calmness of the train, instead of the high-tech stress of a car or plane!
• If you are completely stubborn about having a car, at least make sure that your next one is an energy-efficient hybrid or one run by restaurants' leftover vegetable oil (yes, some of them can run off used oil scraps!).

Electric Scooter: Courtesy of http://theitsaboutelectricscootersblog.blogspot.ca/

You know, I was thinking about what a future might be like if we all took action now. If we stopped buying cars and saved them for the sick, impaired, and threatened. If we all bicycled, walked, skateboarded, scootered, and roller-skated. If we used mopeds, electric bikes, and electric scooters when we couldn't get places with our own power. If long-distance travel entailed trains and buses...
And you know what gets me angry? That future-- that wonderful, attainable future-- is being stolen from me a little bit more every day. We have already hit peak oil, which means that from now on, we will keep finding less and less oil in the ground. The prices will steadily increase until eventually, only the billionaires can afford it. And one day it will be all gone. Sooner or later, industry will collapse, and we won't even be prepared! Life may get very hard from that point forward. We will be forced to be self-reliant. I am fine with growing my own vegetables, but some things, like heating my house and going to school, will suddenly become so complicated! A sustainable yet still comfortable future is not only being stolen from me, but also from you, your neighbours, your current/future children, and all other life forms on the planet. The thieves are the people who carelessly suck away all the energy they want; of course, they often do it unknowingly, so you can't hate them for it, but that doesn't make what they are doing any more ethical.
I figured I would have to rant a bit about the reasons why this matters so much in order to convince you to make wise transportation choices. After all, changing the way you commute is a big deal. But it is oh-so-important. It can be used to measure what kind of person you are choosing to be in your life. It also dictates how the Earth will exist in the future-- whether many species, including our own, will even survive!