For this reason, people prefer to use public transport to travel around. Also, British people have a higher environmental awareness compared to people in some other countries. I also heard from locals that parking spaces are very expensive to buy in London. It can cost around 200,000 pounds in downtown London for a parking space. That's another reason why so many people opt not to own a car. There is also a committment in London to building many environmentally friendly buildings. For example: there are wind turbines at the top of one building I saw, so that the occupants can receive a certain amount of electricity that does not come from fossil fuels. They have also designed a lot of green landscapes on the roofs of buildings to make the city look more beautiful and to play a role in protecting the environment too. They also use environmentally friendly building materials and recycle different types of waste, which can also reduce pollution. Although the United States is also stepping up the recovery of different forms of waste, in comparison, we really have not done enough by comparison to what I saw in the United Kingdom.
For my British Life and Business class last week, we watched a movie called An Inconvenient Truth. It deeply touched me and made me realize that global warming is causing real damage to the environment. And I was really surprised by the natural resource usage data because the United States is the country with the highest utilization rate in the world. Looking at the people and animals that are being hurt in the video, I can't help feeling guilty, because people are losing their homes and animals are on the verge of death. It's all because we don't take it seriously and have not taken action to protect the planet we live on.
