Climate and energy

Hey there all. Welcome to yet another new section of the CEP blog. This one is in response to the emails that people send to me privately, asking – what do YOU do to cut your carbon consumption? What does YOUR carbon footprint look like?

The short answer: I’m learning as I go. Note the title – “walk the talk.” Please remember that all too often, walking involves tripping and falling on one’s face. Likewise, talking often involves tripping on one’s tongue. This pretty much sums up my experience so far with trying to reduce my family’s carbon footprint.

First: What exactly is a carbon footprint? It’s a phrase that only recently became mainstream, and understandably lots of people aren’t sure what it means.

As far as I know, the phrase “carbon footprint” comes from the term “ecological footprint.” Before carbon dioxide and climate change burst upon the public awareness, plenty of folks were already concerned about their larger ecological impact on the world and resources around them. Ecology is the science that studies the interconnections of all living organisms, and how they interact with their physical surroundings. Over time, ecology has also emerged as a popular idea, even an ethos – the principle that humans shouldn’t use more than their fair share of resources, and those that they do use, they should do so with some sense of limits or restraint.

A carbon footprint is a more focused version of an ecological footprint. Your carbon footprint represents your activities that produce carbon dioxide emissions. (Carbon dioxide is a greenhouse gas that helps contribute to global warming, which leads to climate change.) I’m laughing as I write that, though, because – really, what human activities DON’T produce carbon dioxide on some level?

About here is where many people do indeed throw up their hands and walk away. A carbon footprint can be very hard to calculate. There are plenty of websites where you can try (American Forests, for example, or the EPA’s). However, often all these calculators do is depress the living daylights out of you. Some do offer solutions at the end, but those small actions often seem way too minor to reduce such a huge impact.

I find it also helps to understand the larger context – the general categories of human activities that produce carbon dioxide. Most of them are the result of burning fossil fuels like coal, natural gas, and petroleum for electrical generation, transportation, heating and cooling buildings, industrial uses, etc.

It also helps to understand the major ways you can reduce a carbon footprint – using energy more efficiently (energy efficiency), consuming less energy to begin with (energy conservation), developing renewable energy, and supporting environmental practices that sequester carbon in the soil or in other natural carbon sinks.

So. What my husband and I try to do in our daily lives to reduce our carbon footprint. Read more.

First of all, we use as many of the energy saving tips from the CEP website as possible. Also, if you are interested in what you do in your daily life that probably uses the most energy, check out this FAQ from the website.

Those tips we can’t afford to implement now – such as major modifications to our home – we are saving up to try to do later. We can conceivably budget to make our home more energy efficient. We would like to install solar panels and possibly wind generation, but we can’t afford the batteries for storage, and Kansas does not offer effective net metering.

Some examples! Yes, we use CFL lightbulbs. I have only about five lights left in the house that are incandescents. We replace as we go. Yep, we know CFLs have a small amount of mercury in them. We recycle them according to the directions on the package (and if you lose these, you can always check out energystar.gov) We also use powerstrips to group our appliance with phantom loads, and we turn the strips off when the items are not in use.

Anyone can do that stuff. The rest of reducing your carbon footprint, though, is not a one size fits all process. You have to figure out what works for you. Some of our other choices (choices that might not be right for other folks to make):

- Most of the year, my husband drives a motorcycle. It gets 70 mpg.

- He has big plans to transition me from my little Honda (which only gets 24-28 mpg) to a Dodge Ram truck that he can convert to biodiesel. He thinks I don’t know that this is a way he too gets a new(er) truck :) we also try to limit our trips and group errands according to what part of town they are in.

- We dry most of our laundry on drying racks (during winter) or the clothesline (during summer). I keep the dryer around to get sheets dry in a timely manner during the winter.
- We heat primarily with wood heat. We do have propane heat for back-up (the thermostat is set at 58 degrees), but the heater is horribly inefficient and our house has dreadful windows. Wood just works better for us – but it is a lot of work, too. Lots of people aren’t going to want to do the work, or be able to make the time to do it. Our woodstove has a catalytic converter reburner thingie that is amazingly low-emission. EDIT:  and as someone just pointed out to me, if everyone in KS heated with wood, we would very shortly have a lot less trees, and a lot of cold people.

- We eat as many local foods as possible. That way, our food has to travel less fossil fuel miles to get to us. Our meat is also locally raised (grass-fed beef from my dad, chicken from Mrs. Clark, pork from Amy’s Meats). I grow and freeze most of our vegetables, and get more from the farmer’s market.

- we don’t buy anything that uses electricity if it is not EnergyStar certified. Well, I’m lying. Our cell phones. And this awful humidifier that I regret buying, with every bone in my body. But it also still works, so I hate to just ditch it.

- in summer, we don’t turn on the AC until we are about ready (well, until we think we are about ready) to die. When it cools off for a day, we turn off the AC. Your AC doesn’t have to run all summer long. When ours does run, we set ii around 78-80 degrees. For the months of April, May, June, and usually the last of September and October, we don’t use fossil fuels to heat or cool.

And then – green remodeling. I could write so much on this. I am very conflicted about remodeling, but our house was built in the 1960s and everything is pretty much original. We don’t really have a choice – we have to remodel. Or it will fall down.

But, geez. Where do you start. We started with extra insulation in the attic, and a very neat-o whole house fan. We also have a solar attic fan that my husband bought and then backed off from installing, because he just doesn’t want to put a hole in the roof. So we will see. Might sell that one on Ebay.

Then there’s the hard choices. We’re remodeling the kitchen, so that meant EnergyStar appliances. Ouch!! $$$. I wrote the check and literally almost hyperventilated. It turned out okay, actually, since we are saving money by going with extremely plain and simple cabinets with no extra trim details or raised panels (which is also extra materials). The hot water heater is going kaput, and we know it, so we are planning to install an on-demand, or tankless water heater.

That leaves so much… the giant need for a more energy-efficient furnace/ AC, the need to replace our windows, which leak air like no one’s business (weather-stripping doesn’t even make a dent)… There’s more things we could do in our daily lives, too, I’m sure.

But hey. We’ll get there.

And when it comes to figuring out your carbon footprint, I think that is the main point. Allow yourself the flexibility to figure out how to get there.

— Maril Hazlett, www.climateandenergy.org