Post 1 – How heavily do we step on our planet?

It’s hard to know where to begin this, my first, post. There are so many topics that I could cover. What should I write about? How can I help others save time by not going over the ground that I have spent the last few years exploring?

One of my aims with this blog is to capture measurement concepts: how much carbon are we personally responsible for emitting; what can we do about it; what are the measurable effects of those actions; and what individual, and household, targets we should aim for? So, given this aim, I will make this post about measuring our carbon footprint and hope it might be useful to others.

There are a number of sites that allow us to measure our carbon footprint to some degree. They are usually fun to use and most people, who live in a developed country, get a result that says their carbon footprint is such that two, three or more ‘earths’ are needed to allow them to continue living their current lifestyle. I’ve sat in rooms of people who have used one or more of the calculators, got a high result, found out that most other people have a similar result, laughed uncertainly, commented that the end of the world must be close and moved on to the next thing. I gravely doubt that these calculators have made any difference to how their lives are lived, although to be fair, that is probably not the purpose. Maybe the purpose is to tickle our consciences or nag away, deep in our memories, that we need to ‘do something’.

I am interested in the extent to which there is a carbon footprint calculator readily available that lets us see how close we are getting to a low carbon life so I will review one of my favourites in this post.

As a first step, I suggest you need an overview understanding of the earth’s resources required to maintain your lifestyle. If you start with the following site, you’ll get the idea.

WWF Australian Footprint Calculator

I like this calculator. Use the ‘quick’ version if you are in a hurry or try the more comprehensive version if you have more time.

For the purposes of this post, I tried both versions again today. I used the same household each time. The more comprehensive version gave a result of 1.8 planets and the quick version said 2.3 planets so the more comprehensive version seems preferable. Put aside the time as soon as you can to collect the background information that the calculator requires and get an accurate estimate of where your lifestyle is at. After a couple of years of serious effort, it looks like I am still consuming 1.4 planets to live my lifestyle but that is better than my previous 2.8 and the Australian average (according to the front page of the calculator) of about 3.6.

I asked myself how the calculator relates to the choices of an individual within a household. For example, if there are four people living in a house, then the calculator has to be able to account for one being vegan, one vegetarian and the others big time carnivores. It appears that it does this by asking you what your personal food choices are but then asking how many people live in your house and probably aggregating household information so it covers this issue reasonably well. Shared vehicles also looked as though they could be a bit of a problem. We have a situation where I usually drive a small, highly fuel-efficient car but episodically end up using, for private purposes, the four-wheel drive, diesel truck that is usually a work vehicle. I didn’t know what to enter in the calculator to reflect this so I just accounted for my use of the little car.

I’m not sure how well this calculator, or indeed the others that are available, shows the effects of your efforts to improve. I suspect it takes a lot of improvement to see a change in the calculator’s planetary ‘result’ and, while it is undoubtedly true that it does take a lot of lifestyle change to get down to living within the means of our earth, it can be a bit disheartening so a more discriminating scale might be better. In future posts, I will review some other calculators (parked) that are available and see if they suit better.

To save you time, I suggest you collect the following information:

size of your house in square metres. In future posts, I will share some information about how to calculate the size of your house (parked).
annual cost of electricity and gas divided into an average monthly cost. I suggest that you maintain a summary of your energy costs on a quarterly basis (parked) but I will post more about this in the future.
percentage of your electricity usage that is ‘green’ which can mean purchased as ‘green electricity‘ (parked), offset by buying offset credits (parked) or generated by you. There will be more about these topics in future posts.
kilometres per week travelled by ‘plane, train and automobile’ (as well as motor cycle) with you as either the driver or passenger.
litres per 100 kilometres used by your car. The site for finding this out is Fuel Cost Calculator Type A or Fuel Cost Calculator Type B.

A few tips when using this calculator include:

watch the direction of the scale; sometimes the preferred climate answer is to the left; sometimes to the right.
some of the scales ask about your monthly activities and in the same box there is another question about your annual activities.
at the end of questions, there is the option of saving you ‘footprint’. I suggest you do this for two reasons. First, it lets you see how you have improved over time and second, it lets you alter some of the parameters to see how lifestyles changes will lower your carbon footprint.

So, here I am at the end of my first post. I am conscious that measurements don’t change anything, and that there is a great urgency to dramatically reduce our green house gas emissions, but I also know that it helps our sense of achievement to be able to say ‘this is where I was and this is where I am now’ that is, to measure. As a psychologist friend once told me ‘achievement is a very powerful thing’.

Finally, to remain true to my commitment to a low carbon life, I will leave you with a practical action that you can implement, if you want to make a quick and significant move towards a low carbon life. This action is possible regardless of your living arrangements and regardless of how much money you have. Become a vegetarian (parked)! Within the prolific writings of Albert Einstein he tells us that:

“Nothing will benefit human health and increase the chances for survival of life on earth as much as the evolution to a vegetarian diet.”