Busting my CO2 limit, and then some

At the end of last year I set myself a target of 3,000kg net CO2 emissions.

As of today, 24 March, I'm up to 2,490kg. Half of that is the 1200kg I "depreciate" the apartment by every year, but two trips to Wellington for work, and another eleven hours in the pilot seat of a Cessna 152, have been responsible for most of the rest.

And on Friday I'm going to embark on a wee trip* that will bump me up to over 9,000kg. Bang goes my original hope to get to my target without offsetting.

The flight emissions calculator at CarbonPlanet has been incredibly useful. It generated this list of emissions in about thirty seconds - they get ten out of ten for usability:


I'm going to have to look seriously into offsetting. Right after I get back from the three weeks away.

* The blog's going to turn back into a travelogue for a bit.

Did I do better this year?

Last year I emitted (well technically caused the emission of) 12,792 kg of CO2. At the time I said I could do a lot better this year if I didn't spend half the year in the USA. I calculated that I would have emitted only 4889 kg if I had spent the year the way I'd originally planned to (live in NZ, take a holiday in Japan).

I spent the whole year living in NZ this year, so let's see how well I did.

Actually not too bad!

I (through my activities) emitted 4445 kg of CO2 this year. I'm extrapolating out to the end of the year. For those that measure in tonnes, that's 2.2 tonnes. Given that the average I am now below the average for NZ residents (phew) but still well above world average (rats).

And if I hadn't taken up learning to fly (those 19 hours in the pilot seat of the Cessna have caused 752 kg of CO2 to go into the atmosphere...) and started driving a lot more, to get to Ardmore and to get to The New Bloke's house in the outer wilds of Auckland, I'd have emitted even less.

So now that I know how much effect I can have on CO2, I'm setting a target for next year. Heh, just like in Copenhagen.

My target for 2010 is 3000kg net CO2. Let's see if I can achieve that. I can keep breathing out, but it's going to require some big changes. But important things always do.

Google searches: a new CO2 emissions category?

The Times Online is reporting that each time I search Google, it generates about 7g of CO2.

That still means I'd have to do 143 searches to generate one single kg of CO2, but it's an interesting statistic. I'm counting, today, how many times I do a Google search. I'm up to 10 already, and it's not even midday.

The article also namechecks a couple more count-your-CO2-here sites. I think I need an iPhone app.

My favourite quote from the article: "...maintaining a character (known as an avatar) in the Second Life virtual reality game, requires 1,752 kilowatt hours of electricity per year. That is almost as much used by the average Brazilian." I assume they mean a person living in Brazil.

2008 in review: choices and their consequences

I've been tracking my CO2 output for a year now. Time for a summing up. My choices over the year have resulted in emissions of 12,800 kg of CO2 (which is quite a lot more than the national average of 8,600kg). That's according to my own calculations of course, but here's how it breaks down:

"Flying for work" covers two return trips to Memphis, and two to Wellington.

"NZ Apartment CO2 depreciation" is twenty percent of the CO2 emitted in building my apartment, and emitted by the building materials over the life of the building. I got the figures from NZWood - they have a handy calculator. It's probably a bit off but it's an interesting thing to consider.

"Flying for fun" covers one flight from Little Rock to Houston return to visit Pete and Ben and Adrienne, and one flight to Sydney to go for a run and do a little shopping.

"US Condo life" and "NZ Apartment life" are the costs of lighting and heating/cooling and generally using electricity in each home - about four times the emissions per day for my temporary American home, due mostly to the huge cost of heating and airconditioning.

That's without counting the CO2 emitted in the production of the food I ate, in the manufacturing off the stuff I used and bought, in the maintenance of the golf courses and movie theatres and restaurants and gyms I frequented (infrequently). I've excluded that because I don't know yet how to count it.

And it's also without counting the CO2 emitted by things I didn't actively choose - for example, the NZ government's activities. I chose to buy an apartment in a concrete building (rather than a wooden house), so I'm counting the amortised CO2 cost of building it, but I didn't choose the wooden condominium in Arkansas, so I'm not amortising the cost of building that (a pity - it was probably carbon negative). I chose to stay alive, so I'm counting the 200kg of CO2 I exhaled over the 366 days of the year :-)

To use up that CO2, it will take about 8.5 hectares of mature forest planted in a temperate land (like New Zealand) a year of living and leafing.

So what could I have chosen to do differently? The obvious choice is to avoid going to the US for five months. If I'd worked in NZ all year, and gone to Japan on holiday as I'd originally planned to, my output would be (after five minutes in Excel) about 4900kg, only 38% of what I actually caused to be emitted.

I started the year wondering if I could have any effect on my CO2 output. I think I've safely confirmed that I can.

The next step is to make those better choices which reduce my impact on the planet.

And the step after that is to make it easy for everyone else to make those choices too - by making it easy for them to see the consequences of each choice they make.

(And maybe there's a step involving buying 8.5 hectares of mature forest. )

2009 will be The Year Of Better Choices for me - for CO2 and for life in general. How about you?

Tracking my power usage with Wattzon

There should now be a "WattzOn" badge at the top of the right hand column (over there --->). WattzOn.com has a "personal energy usage" calculator, which can give you a rough idea of how much energy your lifestyle uses up. The number in the badge is my own usage. What's yours?

I went through the series of questions and the very first one piqued my curiosity: my energy usage halved when I changed my "country of residence" from USA to New Zealand. Apparently it's based on government policies which affect CO2 creation. I wonder if they've updated their estimate since the election?

Even though I did well out of living in NZ, I got all those watts back again from flying around the place. Maybe next year I should stay put.

Poo from balls of jelly is saving the world?

Heard on NatRad this morning while ironing a shirt: salps, which are little balls of jelly floating in the sea, are breathing in CO2 and pooing it out. And the poos are so heavy they sink into the abyssal depths, taking the CO2 out of our atmosphere for decades or even longer.

The NatRad reporter used words like fecal pellets and carbon sequestration, but that's what he meant.

Good on ya, little jelly balls.

In other news, I've been busy sponsoring Fronde's Mo Bros. You should too:

Grin like a dog and run about the city

I can run without my heel hurting! And I have a race to do! Joy! And More Joy!

Goodness knows how, but my Achilles is completely fine now. I ran nearly 5km on Thursday. It feels like waking up from a coma.

To celebrate, I'm going to Sydney in a month, and, serendipitously, there's a run there that weekend: the Sunday Telegraph Bridge Run. Only 9km and with a slow cutoff, so that I can walk if I have to. Joy! Joy!

Of course now that I can run again, I've got a bad bad cold and it's raining. Can't have everything, I guess.

Running about the city takes me down side streets I wouldn't usually go down, and today I found this little gem near Britomart. Isn't it pretty!


Obligatory mention of CO2: I booked my tix on Air NZ and got the option to offset:

OFFSET YOUR CO2 EMISSIONS
From: Auckland To: Sydney - Return
Number of passengers: 1
Total distance flown: 4,320 km per passenger
Estimated emissions: 408.2 kg of CO2 per passenger
Cost to offset this CO2*: NZD$ 13.90 (inc. GST)

Good on them.

Car? Bike? CO2 part 2

I love my car. I looooove my car. Even when it's raining and the roof is leaking and the cooling system is rusting from the inside out. Love love love.

How much does it love the environment? It's not all that bad... compared to an SUV.

This is part two of a fourish-part post on my CO2 usage. Let me know if you're bored yet and I'll stop.

The only question I really need to answer here is: how many kg CO2 per kilometre? I don't use my car all that much and I can easily keep track of how many km I do on any given day. I already know how many km per litre I get (just over 11.5) and I don't drive enough for it to be worth changing cars to get better efficiency.

That breaks down into:
1. How many kg CO2 / km for unleaded 91 octane fuel, on average?
2. Does it differ by car, in any way?
3. Does it differ by fuel provider, in any way?

And then: how many km do I do on an average day, and how many kg CO2 does that translate to?

To question 1

The NRMA says every litre produces 2.3kg of CO2

The Canadians say 2.4kg. And they've made a handy dandy calculator - cut out and make! It's papercraft for greenie geeks.

The US EPA, via Yahoo Answers, say every litre produces 2.343kg...

That's a much better consensus than the tree question earlier. And that last article also tells me something of the answer to questions 2 and 3. Check out, by the way, the final answer to that question. Love it.

To question 2
Per the Yahoo Answer quoted above, only a very efficient engine would produce the whole 2.343 kg of CO2. Less efficient engines produce more CO (carbon monoxide, not a greenhouse gas although it's pretty nasty to humans) and so on. Can I find out for my car what its efficiency is? I'm good about getting it serviced but it is eleven years old.

For now let's assume it's really efficient and it's putting out all 2.343 of those kilograms.

The internets say to make sure the air filter's clean and the spark plugs are working right. Sounds like a job for Super Roverland!

To question 3
Again per the Yahoo Answer, part of the efficiency is down to the additives. Local received wisdom says some petrol companies (Shell, Caltex) always buy the top grade of petrol from the refinery, and some (Gull, I'm looking at you) buy whatever's available. I'd love to run some statistical tests to check this out but I don't use anywhere near enough petrol - I'd be waiting a year for meaningful results. Any of you like to volunteer to keep records of your petrol purchases and mileage for a while?

Last question. How many km / day do I do. This is where I get to be insufferably smug: since 3 June (the day I came home) I've done 500km, one tank of gas. That works out to (clicks over to Excel... type type type ... clicks back) 9.1 km / day. Thus, an average of 1.84 kg CO2 per day from driving.

And bikes? Well, if I was going to bike to work, I'd be very happy to hear about BikeCentral, a new enterprise opened up just near Britomart, which has bike storage, lockers and showers, repairs and coffee. Shame I already life in the CBD...

Carbon Dioxide - finding out is a problem

I've been blithely quoting stats on my CO2 usage for a while now and you may (or may not) have wondered how I was calculating them.

I've got a spreadsheet. This will probably not surprise you.

I was updating my little spreadsheet yesterday, and hit the problem that is probably the biggest reason more of us aren't doing more: it's just so hard to work it out! I've been using estimates from various sites for a lot of my stats and I decided to dig a bit deeper.

As far as I know, my biggest CO2-releasing activities are:
- electricity usage at home
- petrol usage in my car
- co-generation which heats my water
- flying around the globe so much

I set out to tackle them in that order. So, here's how I worked out the home-electricity thing. My power comes from Mercury Energy.

Mercury Energy is somewhat coy about how much CO2 is produced by their power generation. I followed a tortuous path from the Mercury Energy website's blather about the environment, which told me precisely zip except that their power is generated by Mighty River Power....

.... so off I go to Mighty River Power's Generation page, which at least told me that they had a bunch of hydro stations (yay!), some geothermal (more yay!), a "biomass energy" station or three (a what?) and a co-generation plant, and that they were thinking about wind. So far so sweet and all but still no mention of CO2.

Some random clicking within the Mighty River Power site brought me to their Reports & Documents section, and from there to the 2007 sustainability report (large PDF).

And there, on page 18, in teeny font, was a CO2 breakdown by plant type! Hooray! And even better, on the following page, they've got a CO2 usage measurement for their corporate activities.

So, they generated 5,339 GWh of power and created 385,061 (love that 1) kg of CO2 in the process.

Armed with that data and a recent power bill I can now calculate that my 8 or so kWh per day results in about 0.58kg of CO2 being released per day into the atmosphere. This is data that should be on my bill, rather than requiring me to hunt through so many pages online.

So my questions to the internet today are:

1. is there any way to get this data about all the power companies, easily and online?
2. how does your CO2 production from your home electricity stack up?
3. and do you agree, that this data should be on our bills?

(Interestingly, I originally ran the calculation on 2005 data by mistake, and on that data I would have been producing only 0.48kg of CO2 per day. Unless I'm mistaken, that means Mercury have been getting LESS green over time. I've done my little bit today by signing up for online billing.)

Once in a decade storm? and eating locally

(Image nicked from MetVuw)

Man, it's windy. The Metservice site is down so I can't tell how windy it is, but I can't see the North Shore and the rain is going sideways. The Herald was getting all excited about the weather earlier, saying the lows would be a new record. But they've been getting increasingly excitable about the weather since this new "weather blog" thing with Philip Duncan started up. Are we really such a boring country we need to blog about the weather? Er. On to other topics...

My building creaks in the wind. It's like living in a giant tree. I suppose that makes me a little bird in a nest. In a normal wind it sounds a slow creeeaaaak..........creak......... creak....... Today it's creakcreakcreakcreakcreakcreakcreakcreak.

But I'm pleased to see that the White Lady is open for business despite the weather. Mmm, dodgy cheeseburgers. I wonder what they taste like when I'm sober.

Speaking of food: I've been buying my groceries at the Britomart Farmers' Market for the past few weeks; I'm trying to "eat local, think global" now that I'm back home. Because it's the middle of winter, only winter veges are available and I've been forced to be a more adventurous cook. No pasta and tomato sauce can be made when there are no tomatoes or pasta! I made this beef rib stew with fore ribs from Te Kainga farm and baby carrots and potatoes from the market the other night - it's delicious.

So go, buy food there next weekend.

And while you're doing good for the earth, go have a look at getacross.org.nz - they're a group trying to get a non-car harbour crossing sooner rather than later. I for one would like to walk across the bridge without paying $70 to do it as part of a half-marathon.

Enough! it's dark and stormy outside so I'm going to snuggle down, watch LOTR again, eat stew and drink the rest of the bottle of red wine that I had to open (sigh) for the stew. And maybe it will be less than two months until my next post.

Earth Hour 2008: turning my lights off

Since I last updated this blog I've been to NZ and back. Did I take lots of pictures of the wonderful Indian summer weather, my many gorgeous and intelligent friends (hi guys) and their lovely new babies, or my beloved and missed family? Nup. Too busy enjoying myself.

So what did I bring out my camera for? This unassuming little bottle.

I was thirsty when I got to LAX (no fault of Air NZ, they were quite happy to keep pouring any one of a hundred expensive liquids into me for the duration of the flight). So I bought a bottle of water, attracted by the pretty flower on it and the name, FIJI, which reminded me that there are beaches and sunshine in the world. Then I forgot to drink it.

Serendipity struck: on the next flight I read an article in the New Yorker about the owner of the company which bottles the water, and read the fine print on the back. It's not just named after Fiji, it's from there.

Fijian water, flown from Fiji to LAX, bought there and flown to Dallas and then to Little Rock and then driven to Pine Bluff. Water. It's free, it's heavy, and I just bought some and flew it hundreds of miles. No wonder I'm such a carbon-criminal. *Smacks self on wrist*. I'm keeping the full bottle as a reminder to myself.

I've done the maths and I'm now at 8,011 kg of CO2. That's how many trees? Even Google doesn't pretend to know! Searching on "a tree absorbs tons of carbon per year" gives answers like:

A healthy tree stores about 13 pounds of carbon annually

[www.coloradotrees.org/benefits.htm] ......

This is an average of 12.5 kg per tree per year

[www.carbon-info.org/carbonnews_072.htm] ......

a mature tree only absorbs 7.5 kg of CO2 per year, while a young and actively growing tree can absorb 13 kg+ of CO2

[www.carbon-info.org/pressrelease/pressrelease] .....

each tree will absorb 1 ton of CO2

[www.carbonify.com/carbon-calculator.htm] .........

A single mature tree can absorb up to 50 pounds of carbon dioxide per year

[www.greatermemphisgreenline.org/treevalue.htm] ..........

roughly one metric ton of carbon per acre per year

[greenmyplanet.blogspot.com/2007/12/how-much-is-tree-worth.html] .....

in the lower Mississippi River Valley, on a per planted tree basis, each tree absorbs an average of approximately 1.33 tons of carbon dioxide

[www.institutoterra.us/learn] .............

How is it measured? I need to see some peer reviewed scientific research. But I'm sleepy now, because it's late, which is because every detailed scientific page I read leads to ten random minutes browsing wikipedia/slashdot/xkcd/arts&lettersdaily/other people's blogs/etc....

So I'm going to turn out the lights and go to bed.

Oh, speaking of turning out the lights: turn them out at 8pm Saturday to participate in Earth Hour. If you missed it, turn them out NOW! After the mandatory ten minute random browse , of course.

Hey Carolyn, have you forgotten about the environment?

Yeah, pretty much. It's amazing how easy it is to forget it, here. But at latest count I've produced 3652 kg of carbon dioxide. (that includes daily living, flying NZ to USA, flying Little Rock to Houston return, and all the driving I'm doing here).

Extrapolating out, that's over 21,000 kg of CO2 for the year. That's more than most people, according to this calculator here:

http://www.carbonneutral.com//shop/results.asp?cat1=Citizen

Haven't done anything to offset it yet. I did buy a bunch of CFLs for my rented apartment in Pine Bluff, but I won't be able to judge the impact of that until I get a power bill.

According to Wikipedia (which of course is always absolutely correct), a tree in the tropics absorbs about 22kg of CO2 per year, and a tree in the temperate zones about a third as much. So after some Excel wizardry, my impact so far this year could be offset if I planted 1162 trees in New Zealand. That's quite a few trees. I might have to buy some land.

Free Rice

Here's a fun way to blow your productivity for the day and still feel virtuous:

http://www.freerice.com/

It's a vocabulary test with a difference: every time you get a word's meaning correct, it donates 20 grains of rice to poor Third World people and then ratchets the next word's difficulty up. I can get up to level 50 but can't stay there for long. How high can you go?

Manifesto, or, the three parts of this blog

I don't doubt that climate change is anthropogenic (and I'm fed up with arguing, and won't do so on this blog). The question remaining to me is: can we do anything to stop it? Which really means: can I do anything? Can I personally, all by myself, have any effect at all on climate change? Up until now I've thought I couldn't. And that's meant I haven't tried.

But then I read The Undercover Economist and realised: I can't even make a coffee by myself (I have no cow for milk, I haven't grown any coffee plants and in fact they don't grow in my country, I have no mine and smelter to make metal to build a coffee machine with, or clay or kiln to fire pottery for cups) and yet I cause coffee to be made every day. I can't do the smallest thing alone, but I can do my little bit in the great engine of the market that ends up with me drinking a nice latte.

As with coffee, so with CO2. I hope. My goal for 2008 is to work out how best I, as an ordinary consumer in a first world country (or countries... see coming posts) and a participant in the global economy, can be a force in the global ecology too.

For now, on the principle that it's better to do something than nothing, I'm going to start measuring my CO2 output so that I know how much I will need to offset, or minimise. Peter Drucker, in his seminal book on management, said "you manage what you measure". John Walker (no, not that one) in the Hacker's Diet, used that truth to lose 70 pounds, and I used that to lose 8kg a while ago. Can I make a Hacker's Diet for the planet?

My energy usage so far (to 2 Jan)

1 January:
Normal home usage (in Auckland): 1.58 kg CO2
2 loads washing and drying: don't know yet

2 January:
Normal home usage (in Auckland): 1.58 kg CO2
Car 45km: 8.82kg
Cardio machine 30 minutes: don't know yet

I'm going to work out how to turn all the remaining items into kg of CO2 some time soon. The stats here are from www.carbonzero.co.nz

Oh, and if you were expecting a travelogue with pretty photos: that'll come too, in time. I plan to blog three kinds of posts: this kind, where I try to save the planet; a travelogue of my time in the States; and a gadget junkie log of toys and the fun of the internet.