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What's Can Green Do for Brown?

The next time you see one of those big, brown UPS trucks making its deliveries, picture this: a company doing its part to reduce global warming.

United Parcel Service, which first introduced a hybrid electric car into its fleet in 2001, has now ordered 50 hybrid delivery trucks and will purchase 4,100 additional low-emission conventional vehicles this year. To put that into perspective, these vehicles alone will save roughly 1.5 million gallons of fuel per year, which translates to 16,000 fewer tons of carbon dioxide rising into the earth’s atmosphere.

Carbon dioxide is the chief culprit contributing to global warming, which has greatly accelerated in recent decades. Researchers are now warning that if we don’t cut global CO2 emissions significantly within the next 10 years, we’ll begin a chain of serious and irreversible consequences, such as the disappearance of the polar ice caps. The ice caps have already begun melting, and are doing so at a rate much faster than researchers initially predicted.

Hybrid electric vehicles are now available to consumers, but there are numerous other ways people can reduce their carbon dioxide output, such as simply changing the three most-used light bulbs in the house to compact fluorescent bulbs. If every home in America did that, we’d reduce the level of CO2 emissions by the same amount as taking 3.5 million cars off the road.

Global warming has also been linked to increases in mosquito and other insect-born diseases, such as malaria, because the warming of the planet allows them to breed in greater numbers and at elevations which had previously been too cold for them to thrive.

For more information on what you can do to reduce global warming, go to www.fightglobalwarming.com. For more information on what UPS is doing, go to www.bizjournals.com/atlanta/stories/2006/02/13/daily45.html.

For read more about hybrid cars in the news, try this link: hybrid cars

To read more about this and other environmental health issues, go to www.environmentalhealthnews.org, www.ourstolenfuture.org, or www.healthandenvironment.org.