Post 5 – More about footprint calculators

Beside me, on my desk, to the left of my keyboard is a scribbled list of some of the things I could include in this post.  The ideas are not mine but they enhance my understanding of global warming and improve the precision with which I can discuss the matter.  When I came across some of the ideas I thought, that’s obvious I wonder why I didn’t understand it until now but I didn’t.  On the other hand, my little domestic stories are, as always, just that; activities I have experimented with, that I have decided are worth sharing with my two readers and the cat, to possibly save them the time of learning these things for themselves.  This week I have also been playing around with this blog site itself, to try to improve it.  It’s a slow business, that I’m sure I could ask someone else to do for me, but the successes, when they finally arrive, make persisting worthwhile.  I have got rid of the duplicate headings that preceded each post and next week hope to have pictures beside each post!  We’ll see.  If the next time you have a look at this site and there are no pictures beside the list of recent posts, then it won’t be for lack of trying on my part. I’m sure, if I had a more contemporary approach to these things, I should now insert a smiley face or some acronym like LOL.

In Post 1  and Post 3 I explored how we might measure our ‘carbon footprint’, using readily available carbon footprint calculators.  My interest in these calculators is understanding where we are, individually and as households, in terms of carbon equivalent emissions, and how much we have to improve or, rather, where we have to get to in terms of lifestyle changes.  I am still looking for a calculator that is sufficiently discriminating that every improvement we make is reflected in the scores the calculator gives us, but I haven’t found it yet.  In Post 1, I reviewed the calculator from the World Wildlife Fund (WWF) and so far it is my favorite.  It tells me that it takes 1.4 planet earth’s to sustain my lifestyle.  This week I decided that I needed to take the next big step and buy 100% green electricity because I need to put our money where my mouth is!  So I plugged in the figures for 100% green electricity and it made no difference to my score.  Even though we don’t use much electricity from the grid and 25% of what we do use is green, I believe choosing 100% green must make a difference.  It has to.  If we just think about the theoretical possibility that, if everyone could and did, choose 100% green electricity, then emissions would have to reduce significantly.  So my conclusions are that even this calculator, my current favorite, is not sufficiently discriminating to use to measure incremental improvements in our transition to a low carbon life.  It is also possible that other aspects of my lifestyle overwhelm this particular improvement and so the calculator shows no improvement.

Recently, I tried a third calculator The Global Calculator.  This calculator is really interesting to play with.  It is worth spending the two or three minutes needed to watch their ‘How to use the calculator’ clip.  It is accessible from the link above and is at the bottom of the pop up box.  This calculator takes a global perspective.  It aims to give a picture of the global effects of a variety of actions leading towards the objective of a 50% chance of an average, global temperature rise of only 2 degrees Celsius.  Some of the things I had difficulty with initially, were improvements in things like freight distance.  I decided to pretend the world made the biggest possible improvements in the freight distance of goods, as we all embraced a ‘buy local campaign’.  When I hovered over their Level 4, or incredibly ambitious improvement lever, that text box told me that freight distances would increase by 52%!  It didn’t make sense.  I thought freight distances would have to decrease from the 2011 benchmark levels.  When I then tried a Level 1 improvement, defined as a minimal level of abatement, the increases in freight distances were 146%.  I concluded that this calculator does take a truly global perspective.  Overall, presumably as the lifestyles of more and more people in developing countries change to be something more like ours (although nowhere  near as carbon intensive), global freight distances, as an example, will increase but not as much as they would if no actions at all were taken to reduce emissions.  The key thing to watch in this calculator is the grey band on the thermometer graphic which is shown in the pictures below.  When you change the ‘levers’, the graphic takes a little while to refresh but be patient.  Sometimes when you play with the ‘levers’ in the calculator, nothing visible happens because the change you have chosen has little effect on emission levels but, other times, there are dramatic improvements.  I decided to change two of the levers related to diet.  I chose the extremely ambitious category for both the number of calories consumed per person and the amount of meat consumed per person.  As I have said in earlier blogs, I feel our level of meat consumption is something that we can personally control without additional household expense and, certainly, keeping our caloric intake at a healthy level can only be considered good.  The calorie intake that is part of this huge difference is an average of 2,100 calories per person per day.  This level of calorie intake (or less) is fine for me but may be a bit lower than some Australian sites recommend for highly active men.

The differences, however, in emissions (the grey band on the thermometer graphic) are amazing.  This further encourages me to think a vegetarian lifestyle and eating less than 2,100 calories per day is the right track to be on.  The picture to the left is the levels of emissions in a business as usual scenario and the picture to the right is emissions with minimal meat and 2,100 calories per day per person.  Look how close we can get to the target.

So, I recommend having a play with this calculator.  It still doesn’t provide a mechanism that allows us to measure how we are personally going towards a sustainable, low-carbon lifestyle but it does show us the range of policy options that could be considered globally to reduce emissions and get us on track to a 50% chance of a rise in average, global temperatures of only 2 degrees Celsius.  My next blog will focus on some of my little domestic stories.