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Hi Robert,
They are good resolutions, I have done much the same, except I didn't vacation in Oklahoma - which is, to say the least, a long way from Aberdeen!
So, just to put all your carbon saving actions into perspective, how many flights by air have you and your family made this year - how many air miles in total?
Although you live near to your work, what about your family's travel needs - are they longer than they otherwise would be to enable you to live close to work?
Just to be clear, I'm not criticisng here, I know from personal experience that it is currently very difficult to reduce my carbon footprint in any meaninful and ongoing way and maintain my standard of living/quality of life.
So, just to put all your carbon saving actions into perspective, how many flights by air have you and your family made this year - how many air miles in total?
As long as we are in Scotland, there will be one trip home a year. But we haven't traveled anywhere else. The first time we were in Europe, when we lived in Germany from 1999-2001, we were traveling constantly. This time, we are just enjoying our immediate surroundings.
I have plugged in our entire energy usage into some of those carbon footprint calculators, and even with a flight home each year, we still come in very low because our daily usage is so low. (And those calculators don't take into account the composting, which reduces our green and brown waste to zilch).
You can find figures to make yourself a more detailed calculator here. Your compost is not carbon-negative. Aerobic decomposition produces 0.356kg CO2e per kg of material, and anaerobic (stinky) decomposition, 4kg CO2e per kg. Since if you put it in landfill the decomposition will undoubtedly be anaerobic, you are of course much better-off composting (well) than biffing it in the bin. Nonetheless, it does produce greenhouse gas emissions. The way to balance this is of course to use the compost to help you grow things which will absorb carbon dioxide. For example, by planting a tree every year and caring for it, you will more than balance out any compost emissions you're likely to cause.
I've a spreadsheet with the calculations in metric and US measures, unfortunately I can't upload it to blogger, but can send it anyone interested (email me through the blog).
Your compost is not carbon-negative.
You didn't take into consideration, though, that if I wasn't composting, it would take energy to transfer all of that biomass to the landfill. Granted the compost produces GHG emissions, but as you say it is better than sending it to the landfill (for the aerobic factor as well as the energy savings from transportation).
That 4kg CO2e of emissions per kg composted anaerobically is roughly what you get in landfill, too. However, conditions vary a lot at landfills, from 1 to 12kg CO2e, and the emissions due to the transport are smaller than that; a truck carrying 10 tonnes of rubbish burns about 1lt of petrol every 5km, generating 2.32kg CO2e, and on average travels 50km daily, and thus the 10,000kg of rubbish require 23.3kg of emissions to transport, or 0.00233 kg CO2e per kg.
Let's be pessimistic and assume that the processing at the landfill or large compost adds nine times as much again, giving us 0.0233kg CO2e. This is rather small compared to "1 to 12". Single contributors which fall far within the margin of error of the major contributor can be safely ignored.
But even if it were 10kg CO2e, or 1,000kg CO2e, avoiding extra emissions does not make your compost carbon negative, which was my point.
In areas where there's a "green waste" collection programme, they'll have emissions due to transporting it, but will compost it more efficiently, making sure it's always aerobic and not anaerobic, so that on balance the council can compost with less emissions than can you.
But most areas don't have green waste programmes, and in any case you'll want compost to contribute to your own plants which are carbon-negative. So composting at home is usually a reduction of your personal emissions, no doubt about that. But it's not zero carbon, nor negative carbon. And your original statement that "those [carbon] calculators don't take into account the composting, which reduces our green and brown waste to zilch" strongly implied that your green and brown waste were carbon neutral, or even carbon negative. They're not.
'Very Low' is a comparative term - is that 'very low' compared to Scotsmen who holiday in Oaklahoma, or Americans in general, or Zimbabweans, or the world average, or ? ... who are you comparing to?
You didn't have any business mileage this year?
That's why I give the absolute figures for people to use. Comparisons are nice, but there's a time when you want the real numbers.
And Zimbabwe's an unfair comparison. A state under a brutal dictator suffering famine and on the brink of complete collapse... Well, they're going nowhere good, whatever their carbon emissons are.
Real numbers, in the real world, are actually very hard to come by - that's why there is so much discussion about peak oil or dangerous climate change for examples ... there's not enough precise information to make sensible even short term decisions in a complex world!
Bollocks. You can calculate how much CO2 pops off when you burn a litre of petrol - that's a chemical equation you can do with fifth form chemistry. You can go look up how much coal your local electricity generator burned and how much electricity it produced from that, giving you coal/kWh, and then use your chemistry again to get CO2/kWh. And so on.
Get all those figures from day-to-day household consumption. Then go to your Bureau of Statistics and see what the average electricity, petrol, etc consumption is. Now you know how much CO2 you're directly responsible for and can control compared to the average person in the country or the world.
That done, you can then reduce it. But even without those calculations, you can reduce it. Using less electricity obviously produces less emissions than using more, taking the train produces less emissions than driving a car, eating less meat produces less emissions than eating more, and so on.
Whether peak oil has passed, is five or fifty years away, whether we need a 10% or 100% reduction to avoid catastrophic climate change - doesn't matter to me in my daily life. I can go ahead and make those reductions anyway, and I can write to my MP and tell him to help me with that by supporting renewable energy and the like.
I don't need exact numbers to know I shouldn't take a dump on my neighbour's lawn or burn off plastic rubbish in my backyard, and I don't need exact numbers to know I should reduce my consumption of fossil fuels and derivatives, and reduce my pollution.
Waiting for the perfect numbers is another excuse for inaction. What, you think Joe Blow eating burgers and driving his SUV would stop if only he had the right numbers shown to him? Would Dubya suddenly get his oil company family to invest in wind turbines if he had the right numbers? Bah. Excuses.
Whoa, I agree with you totally, I can do the very simple sums (unlike most of the world's population it seems!)- but without some sort of accurate figures you won't convince anybody of peak oil or AGW.
Actually, I was refering to the fact that RR, just for one example, doesn't give actual figures, just comforting words like 'low' - I guarantee his total FF energy use is not low at all compared to the rest of of the world.
BTW, if you think writing to your MP will do any good then do it, but, bear in mind he/she is looking to be re-elected so will only tell people about good things that might happen in the future - that doesn't sound like FF depletion or AGW to me so I doubt that they will take adequate action.
By writing to my MP I may not get them to do what I want; by not writing to my MP I definitely won't get them to do what I want.
I'll take possible failure over definite failure any day. I can't complain they're not listening to me if I'm not speaking to them.
Again I agree.
I go to committee meetings on Peak oil and Climate Change in the Houses of Parliament and visit or correspond with various MPs - but I doubt that will change anything they do or think. It does however have a huge effect on what I do and think!
You should not assume that MPs can actually do something about peak oil and climate change while at the same time growing the economy - and actually, they may do what you want even if you don't speak with them. Speaking with them or writing to them is not communicating - that has to be two way. As far as I can tell 'the lights are on but nobody is home!'
Sweden has reduced greenhouse gas emissions by 9% on 1990 levels (Kyoto let them grow them by 4%) and at the same time grown the economy by 44%.
I'm puzzled as to why building 1,000MW of coal-fired or nuclear power plants is supposed to help us grow our economy, but building 3,000MW of wind turbines and solar thermal is supposed to be a great and onerous burden which will destroy us all. Nor do I really understand why using less energy to do the same work - for example, take us from home to our jobs - is supposed to be bad - effiency is bad for the economy?
Hi Kaishu,
The whole population of Sweden is only 9 million, population density 20 per sq km, allowing 50% of electricity from hydro - a 'flea bite' on 6,700 million world population. The UK has a population of 60 million, 239 per sq kilometre, and will easily miss the Kyoto targets but is a different economy all together due to the availability of natural resources.
Don't assume that the required coal fired or nuclear plants can be built or operated - without enough primary power and 'net export' of required fuels and required credit the economy can't grow.
Any wind turbines or solar thermal don't run 24 hours a day so they are not 'instead of' they are an 'as well as' investment.
BTW, I like your blogspot.
You didn't have any business mileage this year?
I avoid business travel like the plague. I didn't have to take any commercial flights this year for my job, but I do have to take occasional (100 mile or so) helicopter flights to the gas platforms in the North Sea.
As far as "low", when I use the term I am always referring to my peer group. My peer group at the moment is UK citizens. And my usage is about half of the average (even considering a flight home each year). And there are many, many things that those carbon calculators don't consider. For instance, my parents have burned their trash for my entire life. Over the holidays, I am building my Mom a composter. People have written to me and said that my writing had influenced their energy usage. So when you sum it all up, I am very low relative to the developed world (but not low compared to a 16th centure Native American).