My Contribution of Atmospheric CO2

My total pounds of Carbon Dioxide is 66.4 per day; 24,236 per year.
And in addition to the number, if I add how much pounds of carbin dioxide the average Americans generate, The final total number go up to 24,961pounds. This is 249 times heavier than my weight. It's hard to imagine that much of weight is flooting into the air from my personal activities. At the same time, I calculate my "Ecological Footprint" showing that if anyone has lived like me, we would've needed 1.1 planets. Contrasting these two results, I'm inpressed by how enormous and giving our planet is considering how much we carelessly contaminate the nature, but at the same time, there is definately a limitation for the givingness and each individual has to aware of that.


Indirect ways in which I contribute CO2 to the atmosphere.
Though traffic jams in Seattle is huge concern in recent days, air conditioning in buildings is other way of contributing to air pollution. My conclusion is that I'm indirectly related to air pollution that the buildings like supermarkets, malls, and restaurants, etc to emittes CO2 as a customer. From the sellers' point of view, they want people to come and be comfortable. For example, air conditions are necessary in summer to keep the place cool. Indeed, many people come to just evacuate from the hot weather outside. And the same thing happen in winter. People demand those places to be the comfortable tempareture. But the problem of air-conditioning at the big places are use a lot more electricity than it does to small rooms, and the actual tempareture that I feel a lot of times too cold in summer and too hot in winter. so
What Seattle/Bellevue could do to reduce air pollution is to restrict how much electricity can use at each of the buildings depends on how big it is and what kind of building is used for. and set the limitation of how low temperature must be in summer time and how high in winter.


What should they do to reduce air pollution through useing electricity?
Since the only one coal power plant is facing closure and also, the hydropower generation in summer time is threatened in PNW region, they should consider to establish "eco-building" which no need of electricity for the light, instead it use natural light when it's sunny dring the day. About 10 years ago, in Japan, I watched the TV show about the "eco-building" and talked about how efficient it is for saving a lot of energy.
See the image of a building above. This builing, which I saw on the TV show, has about one meter tall "reflectoral room" between each story. On the sunny day, the sunlight that goes into the room spreads many sunbeams by reflecting it on the special reflector with the bumps. This is a great idea for saving energy during summer because Seattle has long sunny day in summertime.

Now, other Japanese engineers innovated the reflection idea and came up with using open spaces. Project name;T-Soleil http://www.shimztechnonews.com/topics/t061012.html
Another from Taisei Sapporo Building
http://www.taisei-design.jp/de/works/2006/taisei.html

Paints that I use for my art.

In what way do I contribute to water pollutions?
I haven't thought about the paints that I use for my oil paintings. Though, The paints contain various kinds of chemical components. My favorite colors which are Cerulean Blue, Cadmium red and Titanium white have chemical component of cobalt, cadmium and Titanium in it and there are more kinds of chemicals in others. Where people get those is to mine the ground just like they do to get coal, silver, golds and things for jewelries. And also what the another example is that getting uranium for nuclear power source.
Mining has been the great impact to the water pollution, however, the problem of using the paints is that those can cause skin cancer to use them in the daily basis.
As an oil painter, I have some choice of not to use those harmful pigments. Some of the paints labeled "Hue," this means the pigment is artificially made. so its it doesn't have the same type of chemicals, but those colors have not as beautiful and genuine color as traditional pigments have.
Since I have been oil painting for 6 years and probably will continue to paint, I have to be careful using those chemicals. However, as I became aware of those facts, I found myself having difficult time caring of my health because when I'm painting, it's important to focus just on the artwork. Caring about getting my hand dirty would be a destruction. I could wear a plastic grabs for protecting my hands, but then I don't feel close to the painting and lose the ability to interpret my creativity into the artwork.
This struggle has become an issue in my own by caring the environment and myself. I care the environment as much as I do to myself in a sense that I feel that I'm a part of the nature. About the paints that I use, I basically demand the real colors that are extracted in mining, but if I use artificial which is cheap quality of color image but not getting through the mining process.
So my personal struggle continues.