ShmoopTube

Where Monty Python meets your 10th grade teacher.

Search Thousands of Shmoop Videos

Science 5: What's a Carbon Footprint? 1 Views


Share It!



Transcript

00:14

If you've ever gone to the beach and looked down at the sand you've

00:16

probably seen all sorts of footprints your own footprints dog paw prints bird [different footprints in the sand]

00:21

tracks maybe even some bear footprints if you happen to live by bears who are

00:25

really into surfing but guess what there is a kind of footprint that's even [a bear riding a surfboard]

00:29

scarier than a bears the footprint of a bear with lasers for eyes oh and your

00:35

carbon footprint so a carbon footprint isn't like a print that gets made in the

00:40

sand or in the mud it's actually the amount of greenhouse gases we are

00:43

responsible for releasing into the atmosphere and unfortunately even if you [man spraying an aerosol can into the air]

00:47

don't spend your spare time spraying gas into the sky you're almost certainly on

00:51

the hook for releasing a whole bunch of greenhouse gases nope not like that [woman and man turning to the side and farting]

00:57

gross that's disgusting okay we're just going to move away from the hot zone

01:01

there you see everytime fossil fuels are burned greenhouse gases are released [fossil fuels burning and releasing Co2 into the atmosphere]

01:06

that means every time you do some sort of activity that depends on the burning

01:10

of fossil fuels whether that's getting a ride in a car or even flipping on a [a man riding a car and flipping on a light switch]

01:14

light switch you're adding to your carbon footprint and if you're flipping

01:18

on a light switch just to watch someone burn a pile of coal hoo boy you've got a [person watching burning fossil fuels on the TV]

01:22

carbon footprint the size of Godzilla part of the trouble with living in the

01:25

modern world is that you can't help but have some sort of carbon footprint to

01:29

reduce your carbon footprint to zero you'd have to cut all the electronic devices [woman playing a guitar in the living room]

01:33

out of your life as well as cars and even plastics so if you're cool with

01:39

living in a cave and you might be able to get your carbon footprint down to [people sitting in an empty cave]

01:42

zero but that definitely won't work for everyone however even if we can't reduce

01:46

our carbon footprint down to zero we can still take steps in our lives to reduce [woman riding a bike down the road]

01:50

it a little bit for example each of these activities adds one kilogram of

01:55

carbon dioxide to your carbon footprint using a computer for 32 hours making

02:00

five plastic bags making two plastic bottles or making a third of a [Dino pointing to examples of activities that add 1kg of CO2 to the atmosphere]

02:05

cheeseburger so if you can cut down your computer time or on how many plastic

02:09

bags your bottles you use you'll be well on your way to reducing your carbon

02:13

footprint if you're really really ambitious you might even try to cut down on those [waiter serving a boy a cheeseburger and fries]

02:17

cheeseburgers but we understand if it takes you a while to gear up for that

02:20

can't all be superheroes