Global No Drive Day stops 10.8 billion Co2 in one Day! With green issues increasingly on the agenda, individuals are desperately asking what they can do – beyond recycling and refusing to use plastic bags - to help reduce their own carbon footprint. One such individual is Michael de Groot, a Dutchman living in the Midlands, who’s spearheading a campaign to declare Sunday October 28th as the planet’s first “Global No Drive Day!” And de Groot, whose company ‘Staying Alive!’ specialises in health & wellness, isn’t content to stop there. He’s so determined to ensure that the movement gathers momentum that he’s hoping to persuade growing numbers of individuals to leave their car at home every last Sunday in the month. “There are 600 million cars on the Planet today – if we all left them at home for just a day, we’d stop 10.8 billion of carbon dioxide being emitted in just one day*. What we can all achieve by collaborating in this way would be amazingly powerful!” de Groot’s major fear is that individuals – in the absence of a government led initiative – feel that there’s nothing they can do individually to make a real difference. “’Global No Drive Day!’ is something that everyone can support now - without having to wait for the government to take a lead. And let’s face it, the government couldn’t afford to come up with an idea like this – it’d cost too much in lost taxes.” de Groot points out that his fears are underscored by recent movies such as Inconvenient Truth (Al Gore) and 11th Hour (Leonardo di Caprio) – which just encourage people to recycle more while at the same time waiting for the government “to do something”. “But it’s up to us as individuals to take action. Like many people, I’m really concerned about the future of the planet – and like many more people, I’ve sometimes wondered whether what l can do personally will actually make any real difference.” “But then – ironically enough, when I was driving home one evening – it suddenly dawned on me that we could all make a spectacular difference if we collaborated and chose not to use ours cars on a specific day.” A realist at heart, de Groot knows that he’s aiming impossibly high – and that the chances of everyone choosing to opt for public transport on a single day each month are pretty slim. He is however, hopeful that the “Global No Drive Day!” campaign will raise awareness – and more importantly encourage others to recognise that each of us as individuals is responsible for the future of the planet. And as he points out, it HAS been done before – in the 70s during the oil crisis, when governments did all they could to keep cars off the road to preserve oil.

maedegroot at 21:05 on 05/03/08