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I forgot not having a car is the only way to reduce your canon footprint. :rolleyes:</p>
<p>As sally has demonstrated there are multiple ways to reduce your carbon footprint.</p>
<p>My son got the use of a very used but mechanically sound car when he got his license at 16 in 2004. He had been told well in advance that he would have to pay for the gasoline and the increase in insurance he triggered. He started working (tutoring) before he could drive and was one of the paid dishwashers at the summer camp he loved to attend and by the time he was 16 had these expenses under control.</p>
<p>I don’t know if it is impossible to get a job as a youth.</p>
<p>My kids volunteered as teens as most places including their summer camps did not hire under 18, but it put them in line to get those jobs once they graduated from high school.</p>
<p>Hey I had a priority to reduce my carbon footprint, too. I went vegetarian. According to the highly scientific calculator I just ran ( 
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<p>In my area of Florida a horrible percentage, about 20%, of youths 16-24 years old don’t attend school or have a job. What is kind of a catch 22 is that one needs a car around here to get to a job or local college, but if you don’t have a job most can’t afford a car to get to a job or local college.</p>
<p>Ahh, very nice information you brought up, romani. </p>
<p>Looks like I can still get my 14 MPG car that I wanted. ;)</p>
<p>Interesting that a carbon foot print analysis can result in a well maintained much older car being the more green choice if the owner is not a high mileage user because of what it takes to manufacture the new vehicle.</p>
<p>Marsian has a good point. For some people, driving is an unpleasant activity that they want to avoid. The new tech graduates moving to Silicon Valley nowadays don’t want to live in the suburbs and drive everywhere. They move to San Francisco, where they can get around by bike, bus and BART, and go to work on the WiFi-equipped private busses the tech employers run.</p>
<p>All my life people have been telling me how I “have to drive” to do this or that thing. They’ve always been wrong. I didn’t get my license until I was 40. I hate driving and almost never do it.</p>
<p>Oddly enough, one of the top cities in the US for year-round bike commuting is Minneapolis. I’m told the city plows the bike paths.</p>
<p>That is true about Minneapolis, CF. Not for the faint of heart, but plenty of people do it!</p>
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<p>I agree with this. My daughter’s new (old) car is also manual transmission, which can increase fuel efficiency if driven properly.</p>
<p>We buy used everything whenever possible–especially big-ticket items like cars, houses, and furniture. We are also thrift shoppers.</p>
<p>Bottom line is that there are lots of ways to be environmentally conscious, and it’s not just about not driving or driving a Pious (oops–Prius:)). Whenever I get into these discussions I am reminded of my favorite South Park episode.</p>
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<p><a href=“http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0783418/[/url]”>http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0783418/</a></p>
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You save serious cash when buying used as well. You can get much nicer cars for a fraction of the cost without feeling like you were ripped off as much as you would’ve been buying new. </p>
<p>First car out of college will be used.</p>
<p>I have online friends who ride through the winter in Minneapolis. And if I lived in Minneapolis, I’d ride through the winter too. Better than (yeech) driving!</p>
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<p>[Learn</a> to Ride A Bike In 5 Simple Steps - YouTube](<a href=“http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pRk1xZbahf0]Learn”>http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pRk1xZbahf0)</p>
<p>Around here, 3 year old used cars are going for 70-80% of the price of a new car.</p>
<p>So while you save a little money up front, you get a car that will last three years less. If you run them into the ground like we do, it all evens out. And when you buy new, you get the full factory warranty, and aren’t inheriting someone else’s problems.</p>
<p>I’d consider used wood furniture, but not used upholstered furniture. Too many bedbug horror stories.</p>
<p>I always buy dealer demos, thousands less than new & well maintained. But usually they are bought in the model year & are less than a year old.</p>
<p>But what about your carbon footprint?</p>
<p>My daughter didn’t get her license until she was 18, not because we are cheap and expected others to subsidize her, or because we are control freaks, but because she was just a bad driver and flunked the road test. </p>
<p>However, she always pitched in gas money when her friends did drive her and I fed her crowd well when they came over here.</p>
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The manufacture of a car has a certain fixed carbon cost, and it doesn’t really matter who owns the car at what point of its life.</p>
<p>Think of it as amortizing the carbon footprint over the life of the car.</p>
<p>You might argue, well if more people bought used cars it would be less carbon, but all that will do is raise the price of used cars to be even closer to new car prices.</p>
<p>Given a reasonably efficient market, the only way to reduce the carbon footprint of manufacturing a car would be to engineer it to last longer, but that may have its own carbon cost. Or have people give up having a car in large numbers, but we are not that close to making that happen on a large scale. And that has other costs.</p>
<p>On one level, this is good because it means that fewer people see having a car in high school as a basic necessity, which could create some ripples in spending habits that could actually positively effect the economy. The flip side is that it likely means that the current economy is causing unemployment to be so high among young kids that getting a job as a teenager has become so much harder that getting a car to drive has become too difficult and impractical. At one point in history, even in the poorest neighborhoods out there, anyone in high school who wanted to find work could do so. Now we have literally millions of high schoolers who can’t find good paying jobs even when they desperately want them.</p>
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<p>Increased lifetime of cars also depends on owners taking good care of the cars and not crashing them.</p>
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I’ve never really understood this argument. I started my own business in high school and was working for myself - even hired a couple other kids from my school. </p>
<p>I’m not saying it was the most brilliantly run operation, but why do we expect someone to hire underage kids with no experience? They need to hire themselves and prove what they can do.</p>