Calculating your carbon footprint

Planning a climate-neutral region 

This section will discuss how we can respond to climate change in Northeast Ohio — reducing our greenhouse gas emissions to fair, global levels, while stimulating innovation and regional competitiveness.

For the following reasons, it's incredibly important that we do this:

• There's an overwhelming, international, scientific consensus that climate change is real and poses a serious threat to the future stability of the earth's life support systems and, therefore, to human civilization. As Time magazine said in a cover story, "Be worried. Be very worried."
• Climate change is being caused by unprecedented, human-generated emissions of carbon-based greenhouse gases, mainly carbon dioxide from the burning of fossil fuels.
• The world community is moving toward market-based trading systems and/or taxes to regulate carbon emissions. It is in economic self-interest of communities and businesses in Northeast Ohio to adapt earlier rather than later.
• Beyond our economic self-interest, we have a moral obligation to reduce our American, super-sized carbon emissions to a fair level that allows poor people around the world room to achieve a higher quality of life.

The links below take you to pages that discuss our climate challenge in Northeast Ohio — what you can do about it, what local businesses and organizations can do, what we can do as a region, and what could be the impacts. For more background on climate change — what it is and the outpouring of scientific research — see the science and policy link.