The Zero-Emissions Challenge, Part 10: Will You Take the Challenge?
This is the final post in a series about bringing household CO2 emissions to zero.
I've posted about the step-by-step process through which my wife and I analyzed our CO2 emissions, and how we plan to reduce our carbon impact to zero. Now, I'll ask you join me in taking the Zero Emissions Challenge. Because if we wait for someone else to act, we may wait too long.
The first step in reducing household impact on global warming is information— specifically, how much CO2 does your household currently contribute? If you're like us, before we did the calculation, we had no idea. Of course, ignorance is bliss: when we didn't know how big our impact was, we could continue to think we were doing enough. Seeing the numbers in front of us was pretty shocking. There are several ways to do the calculation. ClimateCrisis.net offers an online calculator, as do several other sites. Vermont Earth Institute offers a CO2 worksheet that lets you see the impact of each of your activities: 1.5 pounds of CO2 per Kwh of electricity, for example. We found this more useful, because how do we know what to reduce if we don't know what our biggest contributors are? You can plug in your annual kilowatt hours, mileage, and heating oil and get a close approximation of your direct CO2 emissions. There's also a base footprint that none of the calculators take into account: the CO2 generated by others on our behalf to produce and ship food, clothing, and household goods. This base footprint is difficult to calculate. As I wrote in an earlier post, I estimate it to be between 1,200 and 2,000 pounds of CO2 per year. If you eat nothing but locally grown vegetarian food, shun plastics, and never shop at Walmart, it could be lower. If you're fond of New Zealand beef, it could be higher. For most of us, 1,500 pounds is probably a fair guess. Using the calculator or worksheet and adding the base footprint will give you the total pounds of CO2 generated per year for your household. Keep in mind that the Kyoto protocol allows 11,000 pounds of CO2 per person annually. So a household with 5 people would be allowed 55,000 pounds per year. How do your emissions compare? If you're like most Americans, odds are you contribute somewhat more than the Kyoto allowance. Our own figure was 2.5 times the allowance. No wonder our government didn't want to sign the Kyoto agreement! The next step is looking for ways to reduce. We found it useful to do an analysis of energy consumption by appliance. That way, we could tell which appliances contributed how much to our carbon footprint, helping us to decide where to focus our efforts.
For electric usage, we used an Excel spreadsheet. On each line, we listed the appliance, its wattage, the average number of hours per day of use, and the total kilowatt hours per day of consumption. Where watts weren't listed on the appliance, we multiplied the amps times the volts.
For example, our swamp cooler draws 7.4 amps at the standard 120 volts, so 7.4 * 120 = 888 watts. On the other hand, an HP Deskjet Printer draws .94 amps, but uses a transformer to convert the AC power to 32 volts DC (this was indicated on the power supply). So .94 amps * 32 volts = 30 watts.
Then multiply watts times hours and divide by 1000 to get Kwh. So if we use the swamp cooler an average of an hour each day, 888 watts * 1 hour / 1000 = .9 Kwh. (The Excel formula, assuming the data is in row 3, would read =B3*C3/1000.) Total up the KWh per appliance, and it should equal your average daily usage as reported on your utility bill. Ours didn't on the first try. We had to re-evaluate several of our appliances to match the utility's figure. For us, heating and driving were by far the two largest contributors of CO2 emissions, with non-heat electric use and air travel a distant third and fourth. The challenge was to find ways to reduce without having to spend ridiculous amounts on technology. Wood and solar are two carbon-friendly ways to heat, but solar can be expensive— and in some places wood isn't a practical alternative.
How do you heat your home in a climate-friendly way if you live in the city of Boston? I don't know. Each locality has its own challenges. But you may be able to reduce using Boston's mass transit system instead (which we in rural areas don't have access to). Cutting electrical usage, buying local food, making fewer trips by air, and buying energy-efficiant appliances can also contribute to a significant reduction. Keep track of the changes you're willing to make. The first challenge is to bring usage down within the Kyoto protocol allowance of 11,000 pounds of CO2 per year, and to do it in a reasonable time frame. Also, since zero emissions is the goal, offset the CO2 emissions you can't eliminate with tree planting. To figure the number of trees to plant, take the total reduced usage and divide it by an average of 30 pounds of CO2 per tree. That gives the number of trees for the initial planting. But since trees die of old age and other causes, remember that additional trees will need to be planted each year. We figure an average lifespan of 25 years for each tree, so take the number of trees in the initial planting and divide by 25 to get the number of trees to plant every year to replace dying trees. (For us, that's 502 / 25 = 20 trees each year thereafter.) It might be easier for many Americans to pay for the Arbor Day Foundation to plant, say, 10,000 trees rather than to try to reduce their CO2 emissions, but that defeats the purpose. Tree planting as a carbon offset is limited by available land on which trees will grow, and can cause local temperatures to rise as well. So tree planting only works in conjunction with conservation. To make the necessary impact on global climate change, we've got to reduce our individual emissions.
Once we've found ways to reduce and committed to doing so, the last part of the challenge is to check periodically to see if we've reached our goals. We plan to check at year-end and report back on our progress. I hope you'll do the same.
Take the zero emissions challenge. Leave a comment about your results— or email me. With your permission, I'd love to post other peoples' experience at reducing CO2 emissions, so none of us feel quite so alone in our efforts. It will be interesting to see how many people will take their impact on climate change seriously enough to make changes— and how much individual impact we can have.
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