Carbon Calculations and Offsets

While I think it's important to reduce our use of fossil fuels, we still live in a society that is entirely dependent on those fossil fuels. And we have to live our lives. This means that sometimes we are going to do things that are not ideal environmentally.

Case in point: this autumn, I'll move somewhere to begin graduate school, and I think it's important to see the schools and their surrounding areas before making the decision of where to go. I love road trips, so my first thought was to go by car. But that struck me as a lot of fuel to use up for one person.

My next thought was trains. I love long train trips, which often pass through amazingly beautiful places that you can't get to on roads. But after spending some time on Amtrak.com, I found that the trains are longer than I had thought--the longest would be about a 72 hour trip. Yikes!

So then I checked planes, which turned out to be the fastest and cheapest option by far. Definitely not as fun as trains, but when you can pay $200 (not including food) for 72 hours on a train or $110 for 6 hours on a plane, it's tough to choose the train.

But aren't planes terrible for the environment? I wanted to know what my carbon footprint would be with these various forms of transportation.

I ended up at CarbonFootprint.com, where I was able to calculate the carbon footprint of my potential itineraries. (They state that their US data comes from the Environmental Protection Agency and the Department of Energy.)

Here was the breakdown of doing the trip by:

Train = 1.06 tonnes of CO2

Plane = 1.14 tonnes of CO2

Car = 3.66 tonnes of CO2

I was a little bit surprised by how much worse car is than the others (though it wouldn't be so bad if I wasn't going solo). But what really surprised me most was that plane and train were so similar. I've always thought of trains as being much better, but apparently they're only a little better.

Looking at these numbers, I think I'll probably take two planes and a train. But that will still leave me producing about 1.16* tonnes of CO2. What about that? (*This is higher than the 1.14 above, because the train I'll take, Denver to Seattle, is actually slightly more carbon than the same route by plane, because it goes all the way west to Sacramento before going north.)

I originally went to CarbonFootprint.com to calculate my carbon emissions, but it turned out that their main function is selling carbon offsets. "Carbon offset" means that I donate to an organization whose activities will reduce CO2 by roughly the same amount that my activities have increased CO2. The idea behind this is to generate funding for organizations that are doing good things for the environment and to create a market for carbon offsets that will provide a financial incentive for companies to lower their CO2 emissions.

So my 1.16 tonnes of CO2 have been offset by $14.84 given to an organization that is planting Maya Nut trees to reforest parts of Central America. Pretty neat.

Btw, in case you, like me, have an inner cynic, and wonder how we can know that the $14.84 will actually go towards planting trees, it seems there are efforts underway to regulate the carbon offset industry. For example, the British government has started a program to oversee and certify carbon offsetters, the Quality Assurance Scheme for Carbon Offsetting, and CarbonOffset.com is one of the first to receive approval. For more on purchasing carbon offsets, check out this great wiki: How to Buy a Carbon Offset.

The idea of carbon offsets is relatively new, and nobody really knows yet if it will work. There are certainly strong opinions on both sides of the matter. The Wikipedia entry on the subject gives a good overview: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Carbon_offsets.

For my part, I like this first experience. It's something of an easing of my conscience for the emissions of my travel, which is kind of selfish, but it also invests money in what are hopefully good projects. And it provides incentive for us to be more aware of how our actions emit CO2 and to do something positive about it.

If you want to give it a try, here's the flight portion of the carbon calculator from CarbonFootprint.com. The full version is here.

The Great Disruption

This is an excellent opinion piece from the New York Times. Perhaps we are collectively, on the level of the "mainstream," starting to understand how serious our problems are.

The Inflection is Near?

By THOMAS L. FRIEDMAN

Published: March 7, 2009

Sometimes the satirical newspaper The Onion is so right on, I can’t resist quoting from it. Consider this faux article from June 2005 about America’s addiction to Chinese exports:

FENGHUA, China — Chen Hsien, an employee of Fenghua Ningbo Plastic Works Ltd., a plastics factory that manufactures lightweight household items for Western markets, expressed his disbelief Monday over the “sheer amount of [garbage] Americans will buy. Often, when we’re assigned a new order for, say, ‘salad shooters,’ I will say to myself, ‘There’s no way that anyone will ever buy these.’ ... One month later, we will receive an order for the same product, but three times the quantity. How can anyone have a need for such useless [garbage]? I hear that Americans can buy anything they want, and I believe it, judging from the things I’ve made for them,” Chen said. “And I also hear that, when they no longer want an item, they simply throw it away. So wasteful and contemptible.”

Let’s today step out of the normal boundaries of analysis of our economic crisis and ask a radical question: What if the crisis of 2008 represents something much more fundamental than a deep recession? What if it’s telling us that the whole growth model we created over the last 50 years is simply unsustainable economically and ecologically and that 2008 was when we hit the wall — when Mother Nature and the market both said: “No more.”

We have created a system for growth that depended on our building more and more stores to sell more and more stuff made in more and more factories in China, powered by more and more coal that would cause more and more climate change but earn China more and more dollars to buy more and more U.S. T-bills so America would have more and more money to build more and more stores and sell more and more stuff that would employ more and more Chinese ...

We can’t do this anymore.

“We created a way of raising standards of living that we can’t possibly pass on to our children,” said Joe Romm, a physicist and climate expert who writes the indispensable blog climateprogress.org. We have been getting rich by depleting all our natural stocks — water, hydrocarbons, forests, rivers, fish and arable land — and not by generating renewable flows.

“You can get this burst of wealth that we have created from this rapacious behavior,” added Romm. “But it has to collapse, unless adults stand up and say, ‘This is a Ponzi scheme. We have not generated real wealth, and we are destroying a livable climate ...’ Real wealth is something you can pass on in a way that others can enjoy.”

Over a billion people today suffer from water scarcity; deforestation in the tropics destroys an area the size of Greece every year — more than 25 million acres; more than half of the world’s fisheries are over-fished or fished at their limit.

“Just as a few lonely economists warned us we were living beyond our financial means and overdrawing our financial assets, scientists are warning us that we’re living beyond our ecological means and overdrawing our natural assets,” argues Glenn Prickett, senior vice president at Conservation International. But, he cautioned, as environmentalists have pointed out: “Mother Nature doesn’t do bailouts.”

One of those who has been warning me of this for a long time is Paul Gilding, the Australian environmental business expert. He has a name for this moment — when both Mother Nature and Father Greed have hit the wall at once — “The Great Disruption.”

“We are taking a system operating past its capacity and driving it faster and harder,” he wrote me. “No matter how wonderful the system is, the laws of physics and biology still apply.” We must have growth, but we must grow in a different way. For starters, economies need to transition to the concept of net-zero, whereby buildings, cars, factories and homes are designed not only to generate as much energy as they use but to be infinitely recyclable in as many parts as possible. Let’s grow by creating flows rather than plundering more stocks.

Gilding says he’s actually an optimist. So am I. People are already using this economic slowdown to retool and reorient economies. Germany, Britain, China and the U.S. have all used stimulus bills to make huge new investments in clean power. South Korea’s new national paradigm for development is called: “Low carbon, green growth.” Who knew? People are realizing we need more than incremental changes — and we’re seeing the first stirrings of growth in smarter, more efficient, more responsible ways.

In the meantime, says Gilding, take notes: “When we look back, 2008 will be a momentous year in human history. Our children and grandchildren will ask us, ‘What was it like? What were you doing when it started to fall apart? What did you think? What did you do?’ ” Often in the middle of something momentous, we can’t see its significance. But for me there is no doubt: 2008 will be the marker — the year when ‘The Great Disruption’ began.

Awakening the Dreamer

This past Sunday, I attended the Awakening the Dreamer symposium at Power Shift 2009. It was a great experience.

The framework for the symposium was a look at four questions: Where are we? How did we get here? What's possible for the future? Where do we go from here?

These questions were examined with video clips, speakers and individual and group activities and contemplations. It was informative, entertaining and inspiring.

The best aspect for me was the deep sense of connection it gave me with other people who are equally concerned about the state of the planet and equally committed to doing something about it. Usually, I feel like a voice in the wilderness, because the vast majority of the people I know seem barely or not-at-all concerned. And the problems we face are so massive that a lone voice in the wilderness is not enough. It's hard to remain hopeful sometimes. But this symposium left me feeling that I was just one tiny part of a growing and immensely powerful movement. It gave me a tremendous sense of hope and optimism.

I can't recommend it enough!