Overhaul your carbon footprint: These are the most impactful choices you can make
Credit to Author: Randy Shore| Date: Sat, 08 Feb 2020 16:37:38 +0000
Renee Switzer is in love with her car.
“I don’t pay for gas anymore,” she said. “I’ve had it for a year-and-a-half and I can say without question that it has not impacted my hydro bill. I was watching for quite a while.”
Switzer makes a round trip to Vancouver from the Sunshine Coast each week for work in her 2018 Chevy Volt and simply plugs into a regular electrical outlet when she can.
“I guess if I had to go farther I would look for a charger, but I’ll deal with that when it happens,” she said.
Between the Volt, electric home heat and a diet with smaller amounts of animal protein, she has hit the trifecta of decarbonization. She has a wood-burning stove, but for this winter she’s not using it, as an experiment just to see how it affects her electric bill. (Whether wood is truly renewable for home heating is still a matter of debate.)
“It’s easy to be paralyzed and think there’s nothing that I personally can do, but I don’t think that’s true,” she said. “I have grandchildren and I think of the kind of world they might be living in.”
She hasn’t cut out meat altogether — maybe halved it — but there are more legumes on her plate than before and fish once in a while.
“I can’t say it’s a really well-thought-out thing, but when you read about the impact of meat production on the environment you can’t help but be affected,” she said. “You just hope it’s based on science.”
People generally have a poor understanding of their carbon footprint and which aspects of their daily lives contribute the most to rising atmospheric CO2 levels, which are driving climate change, said University of B.C. psychologist Jiaying Zhao, Canada Research Chair in Behavioural Sustainability.
A growing culture of carbon-shaming is polarizing our society, demonizing people for their dietary choices, how they get to work and where they take their holidays. The clever Swedes have already coined a termed for flight shame: Flygskam.
“People like to make moral judgments about each other, but that is really not very useful,” she said. “You don’t know people’s circumstances.”
Anyway, carbon gases aren’t always where you’d expect them.
Renee Switzer has taken action to decarbonize the two biggest sources of household greenhouse-gas emissions: Travel and heat.
In her own research, Zhao found that people had difficulty answering tricky GHG trade-off questions, such as how many hamburgers are equivalent to a trans-Atlantic flight or how many hours of light from an LED bulb are equivalent to drying a load of laundry.
Recent research has found that the fashion industry emits more carbon worldwide than all air travel and international shipping combined. People throw away about $80 billion of serviceable clothing every year.
British Columbians have the lowest per capita household carbon footprint of any province in Canada, according to Statistics Canada, mainly due to the availability of low-carbon hydroelectric power and our relatively mild climate. We emit about half the carbon of residents of the Maritimes.
Don’t be smug. If you drive to work or own a furnace, your output is astronomical by global standards.
When you look at all sources — including manufacturing, oil-and-gas extraction, commercial transportation and agriculture — it’s close to 13 tonnes per person in B.C., about one fifth the output of oil-rich Alberta. But there is considerable pressure to drive our numbers even lower. Our provincial Clean B.C. policy calls for an 80 per cent reduction in total GHG emissions (relative to 2007) by 2050.
It’s not going to be easy. Since 2007, total GHG output has declined from 63.6 million tonnes to 61.3 million tonnes, which is a little over 3 1/2 per cent, according to the Climate Action in B.C. progress report.
Households contribute around 20 per cent of our total emissions, so your choices make a difference. But while you’re decarbonizing your personal life, you might want to put some pressure on other sectors of B.C.’s economy to do the same.
Here are the biggest contributors to total GHG emissions: manufacturing (26.5 per cent); mining and fossil fuels (18); transportation and warehousing (15); and agriculture (10 per cent).
We will need to run fast just to stand still as the liquid natural-gas industry expands. LNG Canada will emit about four million tonnes of CO2 a year at full build-out, according to the company or more than twice that much if you prefer the Pembina Institute’s math. That’s about the same annual emissions as every gas-powered car currently on the road in B.C. combined.
In the meantime, here’s what you can do:
Don’t drive
Telecommuting reduces your work transportation costs and related carbon emissions to zero. Depending on your job, you could be spending at least one day working from home, maybe more. Need to chat with a colleague? Pick up the phone, write an email or chat face-to-face with Facebook or Skype. A two-year study by researchers at Stanford University in California found that home workers produced the equivalent of one extra day’s work per week, took fewer sick days and took shorter breaks. The company in the study also saved US$2,000 per employee in reduced office space.
Drive electric
With clean, green hydroelectric power your electric vehicle is a climate hero, saving around 4.6 tonnes of carbon emissions a year based on about 18,000 kilometres driven. Your fuel costs will drop to around $2 per 100 km, but there are significant upfront costs. Plus, a lack of charging infrastructure is still a barrier for many buyers.
EV charging stations are becoming a more common sight.
“When I looked at my own carbon footprint, transportation was about 40 per cent,” said Zhao. “I would love to get an EV, but they are expensive and there are no charging stations at my condo. My dream car is a Tesla, but right now it’s just not possible.”
To offset the price of new EVs, the provincial and federal governments both offer rebates that could save you up to $8,000. CEV for B.C. will give you $3,000 toward the purchase of a battery electric vehicle or $1,500 for a plug-in hybrid. Ottawa is offering rebates ranging from $2,500 for plug-in hybrids to $5,000 toward a conventional EV, but the base-model price has to be $45,000 or less. (That includes one version of the Tesla specifically priced to qualify.)
Take transit
Taking a conventional bus reduces carbon emissions by around 80 per cent, and TransLink’s mix of SkyTrain and electric and alternative-fuel buses are even better than that. People under 30 are much less likely than their elders to buy a car at all, and tend to use car-sharing services when they must have one. Be more like them.
Eat differently
No matter what you eat, you’re having an impact on the planet. An average diet including beef, lamb, chicken, pork and fish emits about 2.5 tonnes of CO2-equivalent GHGs a year, while a strict vegan diet produces about 1.5 tonnes. It’s not really enough to justify the shaming that meat-eaters suffer, says Zhao.
“People tend to overestimate the impact of eating a vegan diet,” she said. “It’s not a big as they think. You would be far better off skipping one flight a year. It would make a much bigger difference.”
Heat differently
If you’re serious about decarbonizing, you should know that around 60 per cent of residential energy use goes to space heating. A natural gas furnace in a typical Canadian home emits about five tonnes of CO2 a year, according to Natural Resources Canada. Switching to electricity — with or without a heat pump — can reduce your carbon emissions by more than 95 per cent. That’s a lot of bang for your buck. If you install an electric heat pump, it will set you back between $5,000 and $12,000. But B.C. Hydro runs a rebate program to take some of the sting out of that.
International flights produce tonnes of GHGs per passenger, far outweighing the impact of most other lifestyle choices.
Skip a flight
A coach-class return flight from Vancouver to London, England, emits 2.45 tonnes of CO2 equivalents or between 7.3 and 10 tonnes if you fly first class. You can buy a carbon offset for the latter for around $260 from co2.myclimate.org, which spends your money on sustainability projects in the developing world. Do your homework when you buy offsets as some are proven to mitigate CO2 emissions, such as those certified by Gold Standard. Many others don’t reduce atmospheric carbon in any meaningful way.
“If you are buying offsets that pay for someone to plant little trees that take 50 years to reabsorb that carbon, you should keep in mind that the climate emergency is happening right now,” said UBC doctoral candidate Seth Wynes. “The same thing would apply to your wood stove.”
Dress differently
Natural fibres have about 25 to 50 per cent of the carbon footprint of many artificial fibres. Added to that, artificial fibres are a major source of microplastic ocean pollution. Forget plastic straws, your laundry is shedding up to 700,000 tiny bits of plastic from every load. Polyester fleece is the worst culprit by far. Buy better clothing — made from organic natural fibres if possible — and wear it much, much longer.
Personal carbon calculators
This one is local! https://www.saanich.ca/EN/main/community/sustainable-saanich/green-at-home/carbon-fund-calculator.html
Customize to B.C.: https://www.carbonfootprint.com/calculator.aspx
Easy and focused: https://treecanada.ca/reforestation-carbon-offsetting/carbon-offsetting/carbon-calculator/