10 Things You Can Do
- When Henry Ford started making the Model T in 1908, that car got 25-30 miles per gallon—and it ran on either gasoline or ethanol. Ford’s Model A, released in 1927, got 20-30 miles per gallon. It doesn’t appear we’ve made much progress since then. Perhaps it’s time we did. Forty miles per gallon is technically possible; the automakers just need to be strongly persuaded.
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Turn Amtrak into a real national railroad
- Forget trying to make Amtrak pay its way. It needs to be heavily subsidized (as are highways and air travel) and expanded. Rail is a far more energy-efficient method of moving people and freight across land than are air and private automobile. For example, rail freight is eight times as energy-efficient as freight trucking.
Amtrak, such as it is, is the United States’ only national passenger railroad system. In 2004, more than 25 million passengers used Amtrak. By comparison, in 1916 rail passenger used peaked with 1.2 billion passengers.
National Association of Railroad Passengers
www.narprail.org
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Drastically expand funding for mass transit
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Mandate, and fund, the replacement of incandescent bulbs with compact fluorescent bulbs nationwide
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Require the federal government to set and enforce stringent caps on greenhouse gas emissions
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Require the federal government to join with the international community to combat global warming
Global Warming Resources
U.N. Panel on Climate Change
www.ipcc.ch
RealClimate
www.realclimate.org
Global Warming
www.ucsusa.org/global_warming
Climate Crisis Coalition
www.climatecrisiscoalition.org
The Heat is Online
www.heatisonline.org
Greenpeace
www.greenpeace.org
Sierra Club
www.sierraclub.org/globalwarming
Friends of the Earth
www.foe.org/globalwarming
Stop Global Warming
www.stopglobalwarming.org
WorldWatch
www.worldwatch.org
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