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How can carbon dioxide (CO2) hurt us? We breathe it out every day. It’s part of nature.
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The carbon dioxide (CO2) that you exhale is part of a normal, regular cycle within your lungs that has not been interrupted by outside forces. However, during the past few hundred years, humans have interfered in the natural carbon cycle, or carbon circulation patterns of the earth. Their activities have released disproportionate amounts of CO2 into the atmosphere. This is dangerous.

CO2 is a colorless, odorless, water-soluble gas composed of one carbon and two oxygen atoms. Plants metabolize CO2, while animals exhale it. CO2 is also a very powerful greenhouse gas now found in increasing concentrations throughout the earth’s atmosphere, where it lasts for around one hundred years. The main way CO2 enters the earth’s atmosphere is through carbon combustion, usually as the waste product of burning fossil fuels for electrical generation and transportation.

By absorbing the sun’s radiation CO2 holds heat in the earth’s atmosphere. CO2 also intensifies the atmosphere’s ability to hold water vapor, another powerful greenhouse gas. Thus CO2 is a major factor in the global warming which in turn leads to climate change.
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Are you a crazy driver? Speeding, accelerating quickly, and heavy braking can cut your mileage up to 33 percent. At today’s high gas prices, that’s more than an extra 73 cents per gallon.
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