Welcome to The Zero Fossil Fuel 10 Year Challenge. This site was created in response to Al Gore’s challenge to America to get to zero fossil fuel-based energy usage within 10 years. I am a mom in a so-called typical American family. My husband and I have two children (ages 4 and 2), two full-time jobs, and a suburban lifestyle. We have a comfortable life and little material incentive to change. Gas prices are annoying, but not (at this point) affecting our standard of living (although I am highly aware this is not the case for millions of other American families). So even though we don’t have to, I believe in my heart that we are at a critical point in our history and that we must rise to the challenge now to make significant changes, even if this changes our lifestyle over time.

To Al Gore I say, “I’m in.” To reach this goal, we will need to make changes on many levels, national, state, local and individual.  I am committing to changes at the individual and family level to get to this goal within 10 years. Since I am not a trained environmentalist, I (along with my family), will have much to learn. I hope others will be able to leverage these learnings along with us. A couple of early thoughts about how we will approach this:

1. I see this as a long-term lifestyle evolution and do not plan to make immediate radical changes. My husband and I will map out long-term approach to getting to this goal. And we’ll work on this in an incremental, step-by-step way.
2. Our plan, as it evolves, will be based on the idea that it should be realistically do-able. As such, we will likely set an annual budget for making these changes, probably something in the range of a monthly car payment for a typical mid-sized car.
3. I will look at this as a great opportunity to connect more with family and my local community.

Learn more from Mr. Gore himself:

Sandy