marklynas.orgMy carbon footprint 19 December 06
Ever since I started working on my upcoming Carbon Counter book I have wanted to take a couple of hours out to calculate my own carbon footprint for the past year. Honesty is always the best policy, right? Well, the first copies just came through the post from the publishers (it's properly out in the shops next month), and I have requisitioned one in order to do the calculations. So what's the total?
Our domestic gas use at home produced 531 kg of CO2 per person – that’s about half the average for a small family home. It’s very low because we use a wood burner almost entirely for space heating, so the central heating is almost always turned off. For most of the year our southwest-facing conservatory also adds a lot of passive solar heat to the building (and we don’t use it at all in cold weather or at night, so it doesn’t lose heat from the house).
Our electricity is provided by Good Energy, which as far as I know is the only green tariff guaranteeing 100% renewable power. So there’s no carbon at all from this very major sector of energy use.
We don’t own a car, so the only car miles come from the occasional hire of a car to visit family and friends. (Trips within Oxford are almost entirely by bicycle, often with a child seat on the back.) This added up to 174 kg of CO2. More substantial was train travel, which we do a lot more of – particularly visits to Wales (where my parents live), in and out of London, and down to Cornwall on holiday. This adds up to 372 kg. Then there’s 18kg from the ferry to the Scillies and back (estimated roughly). I took no personal flights during the year (that doesn’t mean I didn’t go on a plane – see below for more on this).
Add 600kg for a very rough estimate for food and other consumption (using COIN’s figures). We’re probably about 30% self-sufficient in food which I grow on the allotment – pretty much everything else is bought from the neighbourhood farmers’ market, or in local shops (I haven’t been in a supermarket for years).
This brings my Grand Total to 1695kg, about a sixth of the UK average of approximately 9400kg.
But before I get too smug, there are a couple of major catches. The first is the issue of scalability – can I realistically advocate my lifestyle as a way forward for others? I worry particularly about the wood burner: if everyone was to use wood for heating, how rapidly would our remaining forests disappear? There would presumably also be problems regarding local pollution, particularly on cold, still nights when I can smell our smoke from a hundred metres away. If the entire country was burning wood, would we return fairly quickly to the days of pea-souper smogs with hundreds of deaths from lung disease?
There’s also scalability issues regarding green electricity. At the moment, there is enough renewable power for everyone who signs up to Good Energy to have their home power use covered. (Why don’t more people do it?) But if hundreds of thousands of people signed up, the demand would soon outstrip investment. There is also perhaps a theoretical limit to the amount of electricity that can be produced by renewables, particularly because of the intermittency issue. This might be 30% for wind, and about the same for solar and other sources. Still, at least using green power pushes market demand in the right direction.
The second, and more important, catch is that the total above is my personal carbon footprint. If I start including business and campaigning activities, then things begin to go rapidly downhill. I took flights last year to Lithuania, Sweden, the United States, and back from Prague (due to medical issues – we’d gone out by train, but my back got bad, and I had to be wheelchaired through the airport!). All of these were of course aimed at increasing climate change awareness: in Sweden, Lithuania and Prague I gave climate change lectures to audiences of several hundred, and also did a great deal of media work on TV, radio and newspapers. In the US I was meeting people from National Geographic, a relationship which has now blossomed – I have signed a contract for Six Degrees to become a major documentary on NG’s international TV channel.
These flights add up to about 8,700kg carbon impact, including a 3x multiplier to account for the effects of aviation on the high atmosphere (this is an issue not settled by science – some of the carbon offset companies include no multiplier at all). If you add this to my personal total above, the total including business activities would be 10,395kg, slightly above the UK national average.
So, am I a climate change hypocrite?
Well, all of this travel, I assume, outweighs in terms of awareness-raising the direct climatic impact of the flights. I cannot prove this of course, nor even begin to quantify it, but I do believe that more benefit is done to the climate – particularly with the urgency of the issue at present – by being prepared to travel and help raise its profile than to stay at home feeling pious. (There are alternatives – teleconferencing, for example, which I have also done, but I have found that these are no substitute for face to face interaction, and also do not raise any media interest like a visit does. I also travelled by train to Germany and – one-way – to Prague.)
That being said, I am hardly the only person to face this dilemma: Al Gore must have a pretty hefty ‘business’ carbon budget, and given the amazing international impact he has had with his talks and films, I feel every kg of carbon he has been responsible for has been more than ‘offset’ by societal change elsewhere. Likewise, scientists who need to fly over Antarctica or Greenland to study changes in the mass balance of the ice-cap are more than justified in doing so – again, I think the increase in our scientific understanding must outweigh the direct damage they are doing. It’s the old omelettes-eggs thing again, I guess (you can’t make an omelette without breaking eggs).
There is also a second issue regarding ‘business’ travel – I would not argue that employees of any organisation should be personally responsible in carbon footprint terms for emissions generated in the course of their work. You don’t add your office lights and electricity to your personal carbon footprint, nor do you add work-related flights. If we think in terms of carbon rationing, individual rations are for individual household use, not to keep one’s employer in business – they will have to buy their own carbon allocations to keep the company afloat. It is much more difficult for me as a self-employed person to draw the line, but if I have taken a flight at the behest of someone else – and have not paid for it – then I consider it not to have come out of my carbon ‘ration’ either. This seems like a reasonable way to divide it up.
Of course, all of this would be much easier to administrate if we had carbon rationing imposed and regulated nationally by the government. Then if someone wanted me to fly to Sweden to give a talk on climate change, they’d need to pay for both flights and carbon costs – and I wouldn’t be faced with this dilemma. Once there is an international ‘cap’ on carbon, we will have the certainty of knowing that carbon expenditure in one place will by definition by balanced by reductions in another. I cannot see any other reliable way to solve the climate change problem. It is this campaign which I am hoping to help succeed, of course. And I might add, that once the campaign is won, I will never step on a plane again!
Comments
Cathy Green
December 19th, 2006 at 11:53 PM
Tis the Season to cut carbon! I am trying to start a movement of Gloucestershire people all cutting their personal carbon emissions down to One Tonne a year from the UK average of Five Tonnes a year. Personally I manage 1.25 Tonnes so am not yet a One Tonner but my indirect carbon emissions (food, work, goods and services I buy) is probably another Tonne on top of this. The best carbon calculator I have found to work out personal and indirect emissions is CAT’s Carbon Gym (out on the web end of Jan. 07) everyone wants to know what their carbon footprint is these days! I really hope I get lots of interest for my first meeting on Friday 2nd February at the local Uni. Check out my blog if you are local to Gloucestershire = http://theonetonners.blogspot.com.
Mark Lynas
December 20th, 2006 at 09:48 AM
I thought it was 9.4 tonnes (of CO2 – not to be confused with carbon, to convert to which you need to divide by 3.67, which makes about 2.5 tonnes of C as the UK national average). What does your quoted average of five tonnes comprise of? Just the personal element, so not industrial emissions?
jim roland
December 20th, 2006 at 12:34 PM
Anyone reading, please beware that even if you have a ‘green tariff’ you should still use as little electricity as possible, since these companies sell most or all of their certificates of renewable generation on to other companies for fulfilment of the Renewables Obligation, which is currently unfulfilled. The marginal effect of your consuming more electricity is largely to stimulate more fossil fuel use.
Ecotricity have an alternative model that they are the best supplier because they invest proportionately more of their profits in new wind parks. They have a number of prominent supporters including the Ecologist.
There are a number of counter-arguments to the renewable intermittency argument. You can still increase the share of generation beyond 30% but the marginal cost-effectiveness of new installations drops a bit. You still need other power sources as back-up, so you keep pyrolitic plant on standby, stockpile biomass or biogas for the purpose and bury the emissions where possible. The spare electricity generated by the renewables at off-peak times can be used to recharge electric vehicles. Lastly, generators could be given more freedom to charge more for supply at times of predicted peak demand.
Lynn Vincentnathan
December 20th, 2006 at 09:14 PM
at (I believe) 1/2 the carbon emissions as the average American. And it’s great you & others are trying to reduce that.
What to do about the elephant in the room (Americans), blowing their Hummer & SUV smoke right in the face of do-gooders. I’ll keep trying to break through to my fellow countrymen….
Keith Farnish
December 20th, 2006 at 10:07 PM
Excellent analysis, Mark. I am impressed by your personal footprint – you have obviously had a long time to get it down to such a low level; as I have only been an environmental evangalist for about 5 years I can vouch for the fact that it does take time to make the necessary changes, and in some cases it requires changing jobs, moving house, changing diet – all kinds of things that require significant personal investment. So well done again.
I was very interested with the issue of business vs personal carbon. In your case you make a good argument for your “business” (non-profit) flghts being carbon well spent, but this is extremely difficult to quantify. What troubles me is the number of people who will try to justify their own air travel, car travel etc. based on rather dubious goals. For instance, the person who travels to Australia to meet a fellow campaigner, or more commonly someone who goes on a “green” working holiday, in order to carry out some worthy but trivial improvement to their destination. In most cases people should ask themselves the following question:
Can I carry out my aims without having to travel?
There are many alternatives available depending on the aim of the journey : video or audio conferencing (not that complicated), subsidising local people to do the work themselves (often better in the long run), carrying out online research, developing virtual networks of people to share ideas, etc. There are probably only a handful of people who need to travel extensively in order to run their businesses, let alone carry out environmental campaign work – and we all need to take a long, hard look at our own motivation. We may even find that our reasons for travelling are more to do with self-betterment than the common good.
Keith Farnish http://www.theearthblog.org http://www.reduce3.org
Cathy Green
December 21st, 2006 at 09:51 AM
Um, George Monbiot quotes the UK national average as 9.7 tonnes of CO2 both personal and indirect emissions. Meyer Hillman quotes the UK national average for personal emissions as 5.4 tonnes of CO2, and rounds up the indirect emissions per UK person to around 5 tonnes of CO2 also, making a total of 10 tonnes of CO2 per UK person. Then the Indy posted a grand UK total of 11 tonnes of CO2 per person a few days ago – so I guess to round it up to 10 tonnes is probably a safe bet – the Indy’s stats were based on work done by the Carbon Trust. So it depends who you trust!
Keith Thomas
December 22nd, 2006 at 10:41 AM
Mark, you write that “Our electricity is provided by Good Energy, which as far as I know is the only green tariff guaranteeing 100% renewable power. So there’s no carbon at all from this very major sector of energy use.”
But this ignores the externalities. Are there no carbon emissions at all from the operations of Green Energy? Do they not have company cars? Do they not purchase goods which emitted carbon in their manufacture and transport?
I don’t want to sound nit-picky, but surely it’s important – vital – that calculating our carbon footprint covers all the carbon emitted and not just the direct emissions. If we allow some to slip down the cracks on every occasion, pretty soon it will add up to a significant total and this paper exercise will end up as an exercise in feel-good self delusion. But it won’t delude the planet.
This stuff is not simple.
Keith
Keith Thomas
December 22nd, 2006 at 11:35 AM
What you say about our carbon footprint carries with it the risk that, because it is difficult to get down to the necessarily massively negative carbon footprint, we give people the impression that all is lost. In fact there is a better way to solve the climate change problem.
Fortunately, the earth’s systems are very complex and this gives us many perspectives on climate change. Unfortunately, most academics are blinkered by their narrow disciplines which are a totally artificial contrivance and bear no resemblance to the way our wonderful planet works. James Lovelock, being an independent scientist, is one who has transcended these disciplines and the stifling culture of academe.
Another one is Walter Jehne. Walter has recently published a paper on the biology of climate change. In it he brings together conventional climate science but also reaches into microbiology to extend James Lovelock’s perspective.
Walter’s paper was published last week in the journal Nature and Society:
http://www.natsoc.org.au/html/publications/Journal%2006-6%20Dec-Jan.pdf
The paper itself is also available separately at:
http://www.natsoc.org.au/html/publications/GW_06_12_09.pdf
I think it’s an exciting piece of work which will revolutionize our approach to climate change, particularly as it offers real and effective ways to reverse the present warming trend.
Hope you are as taken by Walter’s ideas as I am.
Keith
Keith Farnish
December 23rd, 2006 at 11:13 AM
I have had a quick skim of the paper, and whilst the conclusions make sense (i.e. plant lots of trees to help mitigate CO2 increase), the author appears to have confused causal and circumstantial relationships. Yes, CO2 increases have accompanied the accelerating deforestation of the planet, and this deforestation must be reversed, but there is more of a philosophical relationship between the deforestation that humans cause and our attitude to carbon emissions – stopping one may require the same mindset in stopping the other – than a physical one. I hope that Dr Jehne is not suggesting that so long as we restore the forests then we can continue increasing our carbon emissions.
The other issue – and please bear in mind this was only from a skim – is the lack of any supporting references. I always ensure I have the reference data to hand when writing data based articles, even though I do not always directly reference them (it can get a little confusing in a blog); and whenever I base the findings of an article on key pieces of data (see for instance, “What If…Everyone Became Vegan?” or “What If…The Population Stopped Growing?”) I make sure readers know where that data came from. If you have the references for some of the figures quoted on Dr Jehne’s article, such as those for the different forms of condensation nuclei causing different types of clouds (I have some meteorological training, and this is certainly the first time I have heard of this), or the 1% increase in mean solar reflectance being equivalent to the net anthropomorphic carbon increase in radiative forcing.
Don’t forget, we have seen ideas like this before, for example in using silver iodide to seed clouds, or iron powder to increase the density of certain forms of phytoplankton; neither of which could realistically deliver what was claimed of them. When making such claims as “reforestation will offset our carbon emissions” then you must be absolutely sure that you understand the systems involved fully (no-one really does) and that the offset will continue to be effective in the light of continued carbon increases.
Peter Winters BHI
December 23rd, 2006 at 10:12 PM
Mark,
I wouldn’t be too worried about the intermittency aspect of wind power. Dealing with that is all part of creating a new renewable energy infrastructure with different energy sources complementing each other.
The DTI produces a 2004 Atlas of Marine Renewable Energy Resources:
http://www.dti.gov.uk/energy/sources/renewables/renewables-explained/wind-energy/page27403.html
.. and you can see how powerful the wind is in winter compared to summer (esp. nw Scotland), and this will complement solar energy heating systems which are better in summer. Solar energy could from the UK – or imported from the Sahara ..
http://www.guardian.co.uk/guardianweekly/story/0,,1959898,00.html
There are also other forms of renewables which could complement wind in future, and there are companies active in this area, for example:
http://www.oceanpowertechnologies.com/
http://www.wavegen.co.uk/
It will be necessary to store energy in a better way than we are at the moment, and this is a boooming area with a number of companies active in this area.
http://www.cfcl.com.au/ http://www.cerespower.com/
BTW, sometimes Good Energy get criticed (e.g by the Ecologist I noticed) for not producing renewable energy themselves (actually, they have a sister company that produces about half the energy they sell). Yet, I really like their business model as it creates an market for other companies to sell their renewable energy. It allows a company like, for example, Ocean Power Technologies to focus on what they are good at (building PowerBuoy® systems) and not having to worry about selling the electricity.
Peter
Peter Winters BHI
December 23rd, 2006 at 10:26 PM
Actually, I realise I wasn’t quite right about having a sister company that produces about half. Wjhat Good Energy say is at:
http://www.good-energy.co.uk/our_generators
jim roland
December 24th, 2006 at 12:13 PM
http://portal.campaigncc.org/node/1116 on renewable capacity and intermittency – good yours Peter too some of which I’ve added.
Peter Winters BHI
December 27th, 2006 at 11:28 PM
Thanks Jim. I am a supporter of Campaign against Climate Change and I hadn’t realised they had updated their website.
The more I think about it, the more I think that calculating my own carbon footprint etc., is not focusing on the real issue. I am not saying it we shouldn’t try minimising our impacts & those of our immediate family members etc., but it is not going to save the world. What is much more important is to have a vision of how we could possibly get out of this mess, and then imagine the steps to get there.
In that respect, I can see how Good Energy is making a positive contribution to getting to a low carbon economy, and not that concerned about he nitty-gritty of whether their employees get there by car etc.
Mohammed - Glass Bottom Boat
March 10th, 2009 at 01:14 PM
Great job you’ve done.. Me too, I ‘d like to count any harm done by me to the nature, but i think it’s impossible… unfortuately they haven’t invented harmometers yet…. but this would be a nice device!
joe
July 9th, 2009 at 03:27 AM
cotricity have an alternative model that they are the best supplier because they invest proportionately more of their profits in new wind parks. They have a number of prominent supporters including the Ecologist.