As my previous post stated, we are all causing massive changes to the earth by producing green house gasses and eradicating carbon absorbers. Skeptics, Grist has done a great job rounding up the usual suspects if you want to know more about certain points.
The question is, what to do about it all? Running through the various greenhouse gas calculators, Anna and I will produce about 14 tones of CO2 this year. Our total is roughly half of what the average American couple produces, but we really shouldn’t be patting ourselves on the back. A closer look at the numbers: we share a car, and we car pool to work. Our 1913 house has no heat or air conditioning, and all of our lights are compact florescent. We are also able to get the vast majority of our produce locally, year round. When you look at all these factors, we are actually not doing as well as we should.
Our base numbers are relatively low, but are skewed by one thing, frequent air travel. For example, Anna and I are going to Europe this spring. Just these flights there and back the 18,774 KM will produce about 4.2 tones of CO2. Our entire year of driving will only produce about 2.2 tones of CO2. Add in our other trips and you can easily see where the majority of my CO2 comes from. It is little wonder why the Bishop of London recently proclaimed that flying on holiday is a sin.
Of course, we could just purchase carbon offsets. And actually, we have. Anna and I are “carbon neutral” (select the right carbon off setter, they are definitely not equal in their solutions). Have we redeemed ourselves, now free of sin? Enter in cheatneutral.com to show how silly that notion is:
What is Cheat Offsetting? When you cheat on your partner you add to the heartbreak, pain and jealousy in the atmosphere. Cheatneutral offsets your cheating by funding someone else to be faithful and NOT cheat. This neutralizes the pain and unhappy emotion and leaves you with a clear conscience. Can I offset all my cheating? First you should look at ways of reducing your cheating. Once you’ve done this you can use Cheatneutral to offset the remaining, unavoidable cheating
As the above satire shows, carbon offsets are good intentions, but really shouldn’t be an excuse for not getting your house in order. The changes are all going to be a bit different for everyone. People are generally at a different level already, and the changes depend a lot on your location. But it pretty much all boils down to the following:
1) Reduce electricity consumption. The biggest bang for buck is simply changing lights. Compact florescent lights consume 25% of the amount of power to provide the same light as a traditional light bulb. While at it, go for the low mercury versions of CFL’s. That done, there are plenty of other ways to reduce energy consumption – Energy Star appliances, insulation, efficient home design, and line drying clothes. Industry has a ways to go on this front. Office buildings are notoriously inefficient, and our computer industry is only going to consume more power.
2) Live locally. Try to buy foods produced locally, and organically. It is easy to pick on things like water from France, berries air shipped from Argentina, and Brazilian beef. But even transportation and freezing of produce in the USA produces huge amounts of green house gas. An easy way to do this is to subscribe to a CSA, community supported agriculture, hit the farmers market, or start a garden.
3) Eat less, or better yet, no meat. Eating meat has about the same environmental cost as driving a polluting car vs. a hybrid, about 1.5 tones of CO2 per year. This is due mostly to the increased energy inputs meat requires, but also the current state of industrial meat farming. In addition, most of the rainforest devastation has been to plant soya for animal feed, this further reduces the amount of CO2 that can be reabsorbed.
4) Reduce auto and air transit. Bike, train, bus, or carpool where possible. As stated above, we are definitely guilty on this one, and business travel will need to change. Read this for a bit of an efficiency shock. Most of North America is designed to only work with everyone having a car. This needs to change. We need to promote more efficient city design, as well as better public transit.
The above changes are important, but ultimately I believe we are going to have to have consume less and have a smaller footprint on the earth to get levels where they should be. Really, the planet can’t support us living the way we are right now. I’ll be writing another post soon about the changes Anna and I are making to try to reduce our consumption and greenhouse gas production.
Want more ideas to reduce your greenhouse gas production? Here is a short list:
– EPA’s suggestions
– EUROPA’s suggestions
– Climate Crisis’ suggestions
– Greanpeace’s suggestions
– Treehugger’s suggestions
Hello,
I thought you might be interested in this new report.
The Carbon Neutral Myth – Offset Indulgences for your Climate
Sins is available online at:
http://www.carbontradewatch.org/pubs/carbon_neutral_myth.pdf and http://www.tni.org
“Carbon offsets are the modern day indulgences, sold to an increasingly carbon conscious public to absolve their climate sins. Scratch the surface, however, and a disturbing picture emerges, where creative accountancy and elaborate
shell games cover up the impossibility of verifying genuine climate change
benefits, and where communities in the South often have little choice as offset projects are inflicted on them.
This report argues that offsets place disproportionate emphasis on individual
lifestyles and carbon footprints, distracting attention from the wider,
systemic changes and collective political action that needs to be taken to tackle climate change. Promoting more effective and empowering approaches
involves moving away from the marketing gimmicks, celebrity endorsements,
technological quick fixes, and the North/South exploitation that the carbon offsets industry embodies.”
As you say, there are many examples of badly run offsetting schemes, and they do create a moral hazard too.
But wouldn’t they be more effective if we stopped viewing them as ‘offsets’, which are a product in their own right, and instead thought about them as charitable donations to worthy green programmes across the world?
This might encourage more transparency and engagement on the part of donors, as well as stopping offsets from absolving indulgent behaviour.
Kevin – Thank you for the information. I agree that offsets can be a distraction from the real issues. That’s typically what happens when people see there is money to be made I guess.
Dan – You nailed it. I can’t add anything more, or I’ll break it. :)
thanks for the many links to global warming information. this is one area i’m completely at a loss for who to believe… brain of a scientist, mind of a skeptic, liberl-treeugger by default… but i just can’t wrap my head around the big picture.. the human component is undeniable, but to what extent? i’d be ipmressed if a change could come about from the ground up, but have the feeling that a change in psyche needs mass incentive… or impending personal peril. anyhow. i have a lot of reading ahead…
Your best bet is to give the Grist link at the top of the post a read through, it covers a lot of questions that come up.
The concept that we are capable of changing the atmosphere was hard for me to wrap my mind around. I’d heard the standard clichés, like the atmosphere being so thin it was the equivalent of the varnish layer on a model globe. But still, all the parts didn’t really fit into place until I managed to somehow end up watching BBC’s Earth Story (by way of mvgroup for me) at the exact same time as I was getting to the earth’s atmosphere parts of Bill Bryson’s A Short History of Nearly Everything. The understanding I came away with from both of those is that the atmosphere is a relatively fragile and unstable thing. Life has been almost killed completely off quite a few times by the work of asteroids or volcanoes trashing the atmosphere. I mention this not to say that we are causing anywhere near the same level of changes, but to show the system is a closed loop that will react to changes.
Are there other impacts other than us? Of course, they are huge. Volcanoes produce a massive amount of CO2, and always have. Decaying plant matter creates huge amounts of CO2, and increased warming will only speed that up. But there are other things that we have control over. Cows, for example, release lots of methane (much more harmful than CO2) because we feed them things like corn, instead of grass, and raise them in such cramped quarters that their shit becomes a toxic brew incapable of natural composting.
But ultimately I think the worries about CO2 are less about the direct impact of actions on the atmosphere, and more about the changes they can lead to – warming is very much a runaway system once it reaches a tipping point. For example, less sea ice means much less solar reflection, melting permafrost means massive bogs of methane (the size of France and Germany combined) will be released into the system.
You’re right though, I’m guessing there will need to be more things that hit home before people act. Unfortunately, changes will have long been set in motion by that time.
A connected issue to what I was referring to above is that we don’t really know all the effects. Models can only give us a rough idea. Here’s a great post on the issue.
I’ll have to include a bit more about models and ways to tackle that in my next post. No clue when that will be, I’m in la-la land with the trip coming up.
No meat? Arghh. Thanks for the sad news :)
Haha, sorry Gustavo :)
This is a late comment, being already after the Europe trip. Upon return from navigating Spanish cities by subway, bus, and train, I’m missing public transit. So, since we left our car in the office garage, I was pleased to take the bus to work the first morning back. Also pleased that the bus was full for most of it’s long route. While I do like the bus, it did take almost 90 minutes from door to door (including a pleasant 13 block walk to the bus stop). By car, this commute is only 20 minutes, and I really like to sleep any extra minutes I can in the a.m.
The point I want to make (I do have a point) is this: Me and my well-intentioned friends don’t take public transit in our hometowns often. We say that public transit won’t improve until the stigma is removed, or until driving or gas prices become unbearable. However, by taking the bus, we participate in the success of public transit. Chris and I are pleased that we carpool, but to be honest, it is not a big sacrifice. We work at the same place, we live at the same place — not everyone has that convenience to easily remove a car from the morning freeway. So, in spite of my allergy to waking up in the morning, I’d like to commit to us taking the bus to work 1 day/week (starting now). I can suck up the extra time — listen to music or books on tape, or take up crochet. Both Chris and I are affected by the stress of traffic, so this will be a day off from that concern. We can even make it a dinner out night and not have to argue over who gets to have a glass of wine.
One more comment about public transit. For much of my life I am in one of three places: my home, my office, or my car. These are all very isolated places. When you take public transit, you are out, you are in the community, you see the neighborhoods of the city, you see faces and a few minutes of the lives of strangers.
Having just returned from a country where people spend their holidays and free time out where the other people are, and not segregated into fenced backyards, I am reminded how isolated we prefer our lives here. Cars have also become some creepy isolationist vessels — trying to make them into tanks to protect against other cars (e.g. giant suv for the new teenage driver), and aggressive driving and road rage implying that we are too inconvenience by other humans.
I admit that I like my fenced backyard and my privacy, but I also like being out in the world. By taking the bus, I’ll add more “world” into my life. I have enough isolation already.