Set sprinklers to water the lawn or garden only - not the street or sidewalk.
Use the microwave to cook small meals. (It uses less power than an oven.)
Purchase "Green Power" for your home's electricity. (Contact your power supplier to see where and if it is available.)
Scrape, rather than rinse, dishes before loading into the dishwasher; wash only full loads.
Cut back on air conditioning and heating use if you can.
Turn off appliances and lights when you leave the room.
In this country, there are rules limiting pollution released by power plants.
However, there are no rules limiting the kind of pollution responsible for climate change.
Most experts agree that kind of regulation is coming and that has set off a "green rush" to develop the technologies that reduce global warming pollution.
One solution, made in Texas, is good enough to eat.
Big Brown, south of Dallas, has a voracious appetite for coal.
It's the fuel powering nearly 600,000 homes in North Texas.
But coal is inherently dirty.
Luminant, formerly TXU, is required by law to remove mercury and other pollutants from its coal plant exhaust but not carbon dioxide which most scientists agree is the cause of global warming.
But what if you could take all the CO2 and turn it into something clean enough to eat?
Inside a trailer at Big Brown, an Austin company called Skyonic, is racing to make history and maybe change it.
They're one of many company's searching for the best way to strip carbon dioxide from power plants exhaust.
Joe Jones is CEO.
Skyonic taps a little exhaust off the plant and basically mixes it with salt and water.
When the exhaust goes back, they say, the carbon dioxide is gone.
"It looks like a very cookbook chemistry," said Jones.
The process creates some interesting by-products: hydrogen, which is a clean fuel; chlorine, an industrial chemical; and baking soda, where all the carbon dioxide is locked up.
"We've got some cookies that are made with that baking soda," added Jones.
But what may impress the energy industry even more is that the process actually makes money.
Skyonic says selling the hydrogen and chlorine will raise more money than it costs to build the whole system.
"In order to do social good, I found the only things that get done are things that get funded. And the only things that get funded are things that make profits," said Jones.
As for the baking soda - it turns out the world already has plenty of it.
So, Skyonic's plan calls for burying the baking soda and carbon dioxide back in the hole where the coal came from.
However, it might be fun just to save a little.
"Not only do greenhouses gases taste good as gingerbread. But they also taste good as chocolate cookies," he said.
E-mail dschechter@wfaa.com.
