Carsharing: A Green Way to Drive

I've always thought that the only green way to drive is to drive a hybrid car... until I experienced a new way of driving: Carsharing.

I just obtained my driving license in November and was very eager to drive. But buying a new car is just too costly; renting a car costs a lot too; all my friends advised me against getting a used car; that leaves me with one choice: Carsharing.

So I signed up a carsharing plan at CitySpeed.

As booking a car costs about S$12 an hour, I really had to do some serious prior planning before every booking in order to optimise every drop of petrol and every minute. In the process, I realised that there are actually many travelling alternatives and I would only book a car when it is absolutely necessary and more cost-effective than public transport.

Hence, indirectly, Carsharing promotes the wise use of the limited resources we have and it has been proven to reap several green benefits.

So I believe I would continue Carsharing for a while, at least until my membership expires in Nov 2008 or until I've saved enough for my dream car: The Honda Civic Hybrid (Winner of the 2006 World Green Car)

Happiness Generation Efficiency

I was shocked to discover that my beautiful island country Singapore was ranked 131 (out of 178) in a study called The Happy Planet Index to compare how efficient countries are in making their citizens happy.

To understand this study better, let us compare Singapore and Costa Rica:

	Singapore	Costa Rica
Ranking	131	3
Life Satisfaction	6.9	7.5
Life Expectancy	78.7	78.2
Ecological Footprint	6.2	2.1

Ecological Footprint is a measure of how much resources a country consumes and is thus an indication of the country's impact on the environment. So in this example, Costa Rica is able to achieve a higher Life Satisfaction and a similar Life Expectancy with just a third of the resources that Singapore uses, i.e. it is more efficient in generating happiness!

What about your country? Maybe it's time we ask ourselves what really constitutes happiness: do we really need so much food, material things, electricity... at the expense of the environment?

Practical Ways of Saving Our Environment

We all know that we have a role to play in saving our environment - yet we also know we could never achieve anything as significant as the Kyoto Protocol or stopping the destruction of our rainforests.

Here're my suggestions on practical ways of saving our environment, especially in affluent developed countries like Singapore:

1. Eat less meat: Many people are unaware that meat-eating causes much damage to our environment. In fact, in 1999, the Union of Concerned Scientists ranked meat-eating as one of the most environmentally damaging actions that Americans perform, together with driving cars and trucks.

2. Travel on public electric train systems: If you don't own a car, don't consider it; if you do, use less of it. By using non-polluting train systems, not only do you reduce air pollution significantly, you also save lots of money, considering the high petrol prices!

3. Avoid takeaways: Very often, takeaways would require the use of styrofoam boxes and/or plastic bags. Hence, simply by dining in or consuming food within premises, you help to reduce environmentally-unfriendly waste.