Quarterly Review: Our Household CO2 Emissions Decrease
Global climate change may have lost its place in the headlines to bad economic news, but it's still high on our list of priorities. Last September, we undertook the Zero Emissions Challenge— we examined our energy usage and CO2 emmissions, and committed to reducing them as far as possible and offsetting the rest. Our goal: to reduce our effective CO2 emissions to zero.
Now that tax season is over, we have the time to look at our first quarter usage. Here's how we did:
| Energy Source | Quarter 4 | Quarter 1 | Total | Annualized | CO2 |
| Electricity - Daily (Kwh) | 620 | 620 | 1,240 | 2,480 | 3,720 |
| Electricity - Heating | 1,654 | 2,148 | 3,802 | 3,802 | 5,703 |
| Propane (gals) | 40 | 40 | 80 | 160 | 2,080 |
| Coal (lbs) | 100 | 100 | 200 | 200 | 580 |
| Gasoline (gals) | 150 | 246 | 396 | 500* | 11,000 |
| ANNUALIZED CO2 (Lbs) | 23,083 |
We used more electricity for heating than we expected, thanks to a cold spring. And gasoline usage was up, as it always is during tax season. But the bright spot in the quarter was that we managed to avoid using any propane for heating— all heating was done with wood, passive solar, a small amount of coal for the barn, and electricity. Now the heating season is over so we won't use as much electricity, and we're done with coal for the year.
(*) Also, I was able to restructure my business so I don't have to go back to Los Angeles until October. Thus, despite the high gas consumption for the first quarter, we expect gas consumption for the year to decline. Commuting to LA has been one of our big CO2 contributions, so working from home is a major step forward.
Our estimated annual CO2 emissions would be 23,083 pounds— still well above our target of 15,039 pounds, but a reduction of 54% over last year's usage and a continued reduction over last quarter. We also installed a wind turbine this quarter, which will generate an estimated 48 Kwh of electricity per month, further reducing the power we need to buy from the utility.
We increased our offsets again, too. We'd already been buying a 100 Kwh block of wind energy each month through Rocky Mountain Power's Blue Sky program, and we doubled that, reducing our emissions by 900 pounds of CO2 this period. We donated the usual 30 trees through the Arbor Day Foundation, which offset another 300 pounds (using average CO2 absorption figures). And we purchased 3 tons of carbon credits from Native Energy. Annualized, these would offset almost 28,000 pounds of CO2— more than our estimated annual household emissions.
We'd still like to reach our target of 15,039 pounds of actual emmissions. But we feel pretty good about our 54% reduction— especially since it still includes preheating the bathroom before stepping into the shower— and the fact that we offset our own emissions and (annualized) 5,000 pounds more. We're almost halfway to offsetting the estimated 12 tons per year that the U.S. economy generates on our behalf.
Nothing I've seen yet contradicts my hypothesis that we could all cut our emissions by 50% or more. How are your CO2 reduction efforts going?
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