Your carbon footprint is the amount of greenhouse gases you produce in your everyday activities, measured in units of carbon dioxide. Among the greenhouse gases, carbon dioxide is the most abundant greenhouse gas that 'traps' the sun's heat and contributes to global warming. Identifying which of your daily activities at home, work, road, and market create greenhouse gas emissions is the first step to change your habits to prepare yourself to be friendly with ecology and earth.
Whether you are at home, grocery, on the road or at work, the energy you use in your daily life has an impact on ecology. Our earth needs sunshine for plants and animals to live. But our human-caused rapidly increasing greenhouse gasses are trapping too much of the sun's heat that due to increased heat tapped in the earth, the temperature of earth is increasing. The average global temperature has increased by about 1 degree Fahrenheit over the 20th century.  The effects of which can be seen almost everywhere: glaciers are melting; warmer seasons are becoming longer, and there are more harsh storms and droughts lately.
Genuine human residents of earth are addressing climate change because its impacts go far beyond a change in the weather, far beyond any political border, and far beyond ones imaginations. Climate shapes everything such as ecosystems, crops, water, forests, fisheries, economy, lifestyles, health, so even small changes can have big impacts. A few degrees in temperature may not feel like much, but it can make the difference between rain and snow, early snowmelt or late, flowing summer streams or dry rivulet beds, healthy or charred forests, and extreme weather floods, droughts or summer heat waves. Our world is vulnerable to a warming climate, threatened by rising sea levels and in the past 10 years we've seen an increase in floods, droughts and wildfires.
There are many things each of us individually can do to reduce the heat trapping gasses in the earth. The choices we make in our homes, our travel, the food we eat, and what we buy and toss away all influence our carbon footprint.
Plastic bags litter our land and ocean. Paper bags are made from trees that sequester or store carbon. If we could use paper bags instead of plastic bags we could help decrease the amount of greenhouse gas emission. Using recyclable materials is another good thing we could do in favor of ecology. For instance, if we could recover and recycle 75 percent of the aluminum cans currently being hurled into landfills, we could keep 11.8 million metric tons of carbon dioxide from being generated and released into the atmosphere. Recycling a ton of aluminum uses just 5 percent of the energy required to make virgin metal; and aluminum is such metal which can be infinitely recycled.

• The United States contains only 5 percent of the world’s population, but supplies 22 percent of the world’s carbon emissions.
• 20% of the America’s carbon emissions are from personal vehicles.
• Half of the electricity use in the average American home is for air conditioning and heating.

You can contribute great with just a little bit effort to minimize your carbon footprint. These are very simple and easy things that will work a lot to decrease your carbon footprint. Start from simple things in your day-to-day activities.
Get energy audit: Find out if your home is poorly insulated or energy efficient. Replace a regular incandescent light bulb with a compact fluorescent bulb (CFL). Compact fluorescent light (CFL) bulb uses 60% less energy than a regular bulb and can save you money on your monthly energy bill. These energy-efficient bulbs help fight climate change because they reduce the amount of fossil fuels that utilities burn. You will save 100 pounds of carbon for each incandescent bulb that you replace with a compact fluorescent, over the life of the bulb. Turning off and unplugging appliances is another input.
In Your Kitchen: Clean your refrigerator's coils and defrost it frequently. Control unnecessary wastage of water. Use and drink tap water instead of bottled water. Buy organic foods. Organic soils capture and store carbon dioxide at much higher levels than soils from conventional farms. Most of the kitchen trash is organic and can be recycled. Recycle food waste scraps in yard waste container rather than using the in-sink garbage disposal, could save water and energy. Take your own bag and avoid plastic bags, when you visit the grocery store.
In Your office: Switching the monitor off when you are away from your desk shutting down your computer at closing time will reduce its carbon dioxide emissions by 83%. Again, laptop computers are 80% energy efficient than desktop computers. Avoiding printing unnecessary documents and using both pages while printing could save a lot of energy.
In your Yard:  Use native plants with low water needs. Replace unused water-intensive turf areas with native and drought tolerant plants with low water needs. Up to 50 percent of the water used on landscapes is wasted due to evaporation, improper sprinklers, and over-watering. Use a push mower instead of a gasoline or electric mower to clean your yard.
Plant trees. Trees absorb carbon dioxide from the air and use it as their energy source, producing oxygen for us to breathe. Trees store largest amount of carbon. Planting leafy trees in the southern and eastern part of your house would give you shade in the summer and let the sunshine during winter. A tree that shades a house can reduce the energy required to run the air conditioner and save an additional 200 to 2,000 pounds of carbon over its lifetime.
Transportation: Cut back on drivingby walking, biking or taking public transportation. Develop habit of car-sharing with your coworkers, classmates or friends. In the United States, automobiles produce over 20 percent of total carbon emissions. Walk or bike and you’ll save one pound of carbon for every mile you travel. If you must use a car, keep your car tuned up and your tires properly inflated. Giving your engine a tune-up can improve gas mileage by more than 4%. Replacing a clogged air filter can boost efficiency by 10% and keeping your tires properly inflated can improve gas mileage by more than 3%.  For every 10 minutes you do not let your car idle, you reduce your carbon footprint by 3.2 pounds. So turn off that engine when you’re stuck in a traffic jam or waiting in line. If you are purchasing a new car, choose the energy efficient one.
Turn down the heat. Heating and air conditioning draw more than half of the energy that a home uses in the United States. Turning down the heat or air conditioner when you are out of the house could save large amount of energy. Using programmable thermostat that can save up money and also help decrease your carbon footprint. Hang to sundry clothes instead of tumble drying. Use less hot water, by installing a low flow showerhead and washing your clothes in cold or warm water, instead of hot water.
Promote Recycled products: Recycling paper, glass, metal and plastic emit less carbon dioxide because they use less energy than to manufacture completely new. Recycling paper also saves trees and lets them continue to reduce climate change naturally as they remain in the forest.
Act globally, eat locally. Buy more locally grown food to save energy from long-distance transportation. Shop at a local farmers’ markets and you will find fresh and healthy food. Frozen food uses 10 times more energy to produce and deliver. Take advantage of globalization, use telephone and internet for communication instead of transportation. For office meetings, if you can telephone or videoconference, you will save time, money, and carbon emissions. Try to fly less because airplanes pump carbon emissions high into the atmosphere, producing 12 percent of the carbon dioxide emission from transportation.
Switch to Green Energy. Electricity generation produces 40% of carbon emissions from the United States. Energy generated from renewable energy sources with solar panels, windmills and other technologies would leave no carbon footprint and you will save your electricity bills too. The solar powered lights only consume natural solar energy and are eco-friendly too. Solar energy can replace even the electricity in our home. Shifting to these green lifestyles you would be decreasing your carbon footprint by 80%.
Mighty oaks grow from little acorns. These simple actions those are as easy as pie can drastically reduce the carbon dioxide produced during your daily activities. Live a green life proudly establishing friendship with the earth and decreasing as much carbon footprint as you can.