“What things have you done to help climate change?”
Andrew Breithaupt thought for a moment before he answered: “I’ve driven across the country three times.”
Breithaupt, resident of Newton for just over a year, might be recognized as the creator of Green Newton’s climate kiosk. That’s the big Tic-Tac-Toe exhibit that folks may have seen around the city.
With Green Newton, he’s also released a video advocating for popular support in fighting global warming, the effects of which Breithaupt has seen firsthand.
“I moved here from California in October last year, and when the wildfires happened there, you could actually see flames from our house, and it reduced the air quality so badly that we couldn’t even really go outside. I had to wear a respirator, and the sky turned orange and the sun turned red.”
“It really looked like the apocalypse.” Breithaupt said.
Here in Newton, the sky is still a persistent shade of blue, but there definitely are grounds for worry.
“Our house here in Newton, for example, came with a giant gas stove. I read about all the problems with the pollutants and how it pollutes the inside air. It’s not good for people who are prone to asthma and stuff like that, let alone the fact that it’s burning methane, basically, and producing CO2.” According to Breithaupt, the greenhouse gasses from stoves and other home appliances pose a significant contribution to total individual emissions in Newton.
“60% of it comes from our houses – like how we heat and cool our homes and what we drive. Housing and transportation – those are both major factors in people’s carbon footprint,” he explained.
So Breithaupt thought of looking into other heating options.
“Instead of using our gas stove, we actually have two little induction burners, that sit on top of our gas stove, that we do all our cooking on. We almost never use the gas stove except if we need the oven,” he said.
“Induction technology is much more efficient than gas. It’s more efficient than conventional electric stoves. It uses half the energy and cooks in half the time. And instead of heating up the surface that your pot is sitting on, it heats the pot directly. There’s no lost energy or heat.It all goes right into the pot.” Water heated on an induction burner, noted Breithaupt, “boils in one to two minutes.” A boy scout manual will tell you that on a gas stove, it would usually take five.
According to Breithaupt, little, seemingly insignificant improvements like that, when introduced to more and more people, can have a sizable positive effect in very large communities of people.
“By taking these steps, we encourage other people to make smart choices for the climate that reduce consumption. The reason I think it’s important for individuals to still do stuff is because it changes the way that people think about the whole problem. It can be like a ripple effect,” he added.
But the most important thing, said Breithaupt, is to get the word out about the importance of global warming.
“I used to live in Europe, first in Belgium for five years, and then in France for five years. And the climate seemed pretty stable at that point. But when we moved to California, we were greeted with a drought.”
“We had to wait a few minutes for hot water to work its way up through the pipes to our tap or to the faucet, and any loose droplets we would capture in buckets and we’d use it for watering plants and doing dishes and stuff like that.”
When Massachusetts faced its own major drought last summer, bans on water use forced many to save every last drop.
“I created a lot of greenhouse gas without realizing how serious a problem it was. But now that I’ve kind of realized where the problem is coming from, I feel like I need to spend the second half of my life fixing it.” Breithaupt said that everyone has a part in fighting climate change.
“Kids are not directly responsible for the climate situation, but they need to try and talk to their parents about it, talk to their friends. As a family, they can make decisions that will reduce how much carbon they make, and how many goods they consume, and maybe have a couple of days a week that they don’t eat meat – maybe it’s a plant based Tuesday or Thursday,” he said.
Again, occasionally skipping out on meat seems like a very little thing, but if everyone in the U.S. ate 25% less red meat, annual greenhouse gas emissions would decrease by 1%. That’s 50 million tons of CO2 gone just from missing burgers.
“Climate change doesn’t need to be fixed all at once,” Breithaupt said, “But we need to keep working on it.”
Andrey Sarkanich is a sophomore at Newton North High School.
