Climate Change

[watervole]

 There were some really interesting answers to my previous post on Climate Change. Thanks everyone.

The carbon footprint calculator I linked to turns out not to have been a very good one.  I'm going to see if I can find something more useful.

Problems included:

Being very UK-centric. eg. Questions on heating, but not air-conditioning.

No credit for using electricity generated from solar or hydroelectric sources.

Broad-brush assumptions on the way heating is used. eg. No questions on how many rooms you heat.

Advice that ignored your answers to questions.  eg.  Cycle more when you already said that you cycle most places.

Not giving any credit to people without children (you may have a high carbon footprint yourself, but you're still making a difference by not creating new people with carbon footprints of their own)

Given that consumption and population are the two big drivers of climate change, reducing both is clearly important.

As soon as I've sorted out some stuff for the allotment society, I'll see if I can come up with some more meaningful questions.

(There's always a trade off between ease of use and how useful the results are - the best data on home energy use clearly comes from kilowatt hours, but this means taking the effort to look at your bills.  Still, I may see who is willing to give it a go.  One can give far more sensible advice if the data is more meaningful.)

Comments

[ranunculus]

I've never liked those carbon calculators. I fly on occasion, but I also have the lowest energy bill of any person I know.

How about a credit for hauling almost all my used water out to the back porch to hydrate the garden all summer so there is food for pollinating insects? How about planting hundreds of willows last month and dozens of other riparian plants to regenerate a badly degraded 400 feet of stream?

Oh and how about conserving 1,500 acres of oak savannah / chaparall. Both are increasingly recognized as important and vanishing parts of our ecosystem. Oak savannah was once looked down on as a place to sequester carbon, but these days is recognized as being very important.

How about that clothesline in our back yard that dries all but one or two loads of laundry per year? Mine is the only yard on our block with one as far as I know.

Oh, and I keep very close track of my power bill....

[cdybedahl]

Just about anything to do with heating homes is so different between Sweden and England that they're nearly from different planets. I'd never even heard of the concept of heating only some rooms before I started dating Harriet, and it still feels crazy to me (specifically, it implies to me that the insulation must be awful beyond belief and should be fixed very urgently).

We heat our house using a ground-exchange system, something I've not even been able to find a word for in English. It circulates a water/ethanol mixture through pipes down a 130 meter deep hole in the ground and then through a heat exchanger. The pump and exchanger are powered by electricity, but our system gets about eight times more heat per kilowatt-hour then direct electric heating. And all our electricity comes from hydroelectric, solar and wind sources (we pay a little extra for that). So the carbon load from our heating should be very close to zero.

New houses in Sweden also often have air-outflow heat exchangers, in order to not let out more heat than absolutely necessary. Our house is from 1947 and built with a ventilation model that doesn't allow for this (there is no single point of outflow where an exchanger could be installed).

I suspect much of the difference in building techniques stems from the maximum expected difference between outdoor and indoor temperature. Where we live, we can expect to have at least a few nights every year where the difference is about 50 degrees Celsius (+20 indoors, -30 outdoors), so that's what our house is built to handle. Up north, houses are commonly built to handle a 70-degree difference. I suspect that English houses are often built to a 20-degree difference or even less. Which means that best practices for us and best practices for you will be wildly different.

[damerell]

A ground source heat pump.

Mmm. Of course, much more efficient than direct electric heating, but we're all set up to burn gas (which, yes, is not a good idea) here.

[vjezkova.livejournal.com]

Thank you for this evaluation of that calculator. I was quite unhappy about my results because I am sure I do more for the environment that most of people here. You are right, the criteria were not set in a good way.

[rockwell-666.livejournal.com]

I've just noticed another flaw in that first survey. Although I have a carbon footprint 97% of my share, the actual Breakdown results add up to 100%.

In other words, it's saying that my Home generates 49% of *my* carbon footprint, but if I were to change things such that my home uses less energy, whilst it would reduce my overall carbon footprint, it would simply result in one or more of the other figures going *up*!

The breakdown should show how my figures compare to everyone else's.

[(Anonymous)]

Although I didn't comment, your post did provoke me to do the WWF questionnaire, and then go back to an online calculator I'd used before - www. carbonfootprint.com. It seems to me that the WWF questions are purely designed to give people suggestions for what they could do next. That's why there are all those questions about insulation and switching things off instead of asking for kWh of electricity and litres of heating oil, which obviously gives a more accurate result. I was interested to see that carbonfootprint.com made my footprint look worse, not better, despite allowing me to include the children in my residential energy use (ie sharing the energy between 4 instead of 2 people). That seems to be because they have a more systematic approach to allocating 'secondary' emissions, which in my case was by far the biggest component of my footprint. For example, if you have a bank account, you get a share of the footprint of the financial sector. Which is better? I suppose, whichever is more motivating to both individual effort and collective effort.

[watervole.livejournal.com]

I'd like to see that as well. I've been trying to find figures for UK average consumption in various areas, but haven't yet found any that I trust.

[rockwell-666.livejournal.com]

Here's a link to the Money Saving Expert site which lists some typical energy usage figures from Ofgem:

http://www.moneysavingexpert.com/news/energy/2015/09/energy-usage-figures-fall-but-it-doesnt-mean-youll-pay-less

IMO this sort of thing should be the start of any calculation since home gas and electricity consumption are going to be in everyone's footprint, whereas not everyone drives or flies etc.

[watervole.livejournal.com]

That looks very useful.

I'll do a post relating to that when I recover from this throat bug.

[rockwell-666.livejournal.com]

BTW there's a comment on your Dreamwidth page from cdybedahl saying "We heat our house using a ground-exchange system, something I've not even been able to find a word for in English"

These are Heat Pump systems, some people are starting to use them in the UK, but they're few and far between at the moment.

http://www.energysavingtrust.org.uk/domestic/air-source-heat-pumps http://www.energysavingtrust.org.uk/domestic/ground-source-heat-pumps

[watervole.livejournal.com]

Heat pumps should be compulsory in new builds, but of course this government won't do that.

They're much cheaper to put in from the start, and expensive to retrofit.

I'd love to have one, but it isn't practical.

[eledonecirrhosa.livejournal.com]

I'd certainly be willing to poke thru old bills to find kilowatt hours for you. Also the gas company sends a "here's what you used last year, here's next year's prediction" letter now and then. If they store those online that might be useful (I've probably thrown away the paper copy).