A million carbon calculators later, here I am

OK - it's time to tackle my own carbon impacts.

Sorry to get your hopes up. I can't actually begin to analyse the dozens of carbon calculators that have popped up all over the internet, but the question is, can I really understand even one of them?

Keen to become a bit more practical about my own carbon footprint, I decided to start with two sources I know of and would rely on: The Energy Saving Trust , and WWF's Counting Consumption Report. EST has a nice calculator that you can personalise and explore its assumptions. Counting Consumption looks at the UK-wide effects of consumption.

My EST carbon footprint is a mixed bag: my total is 7.86 tonnes per year, compared to a national average of 10.23 tonnes. My home energy (heating and cooking) impact is a bit below average and my use of appliances is relatively high, but my transport footprint is less than half the national average.

Is this good news or bad news?

Well, transport-wise it seems to be good news, because I don't drive much and I achieved my low figure despite generously allowing myself one short-haul return flight per year and one long-haul return flight per two years, which is probably a bit more flying than I actually do. Basically, my transport impact is low because I don't commute by car.

I'm a little irked by my appliance footprint, because all my white goods are A-rated, I don't have a TV and I turn appliances off when not using them. I suspect that it's my IT appliances that cause the spike, partly because my lack of commuting means I use computers more at home, and partly because the calculator may assume my household is using all its computing power simultaneously, which it rarely does. Nevertheless, if I am to rely on EST's calculator then appliance usage must be something to look at.

Home energy-wise, the bad news is that the things I can readily do are limited, either by lifestyle or cost. Because I work from home, my heating is often on in the daytime: I've done some work on zoning my heating so that I'm not heating the whole house to the same temperature, but the scope for reducing the heating time is scuppered. I already have double-glazing and a (fairly) modern boiler, so the real energy gains are to be found in increasing the insulation. Since I'm in a solid wall house, that not only means cost but also disruption. I'm still chasing draughts around, and that must always be a priority. The EST calculator tells me that insulation my loft could save me 1 tonne of carbon per year, which would actually reduce my home energy footprint to not much over half the national average. I have an attic room in my loft, so it would mean lining the walls and redecorating, but that just might be do-able this year.

Since appliances seem to be a problem for my household, I'm going to invest in one of those electricity usage monitors and conduct some scientific experiments on how to reduce this aspect of consumption.

So, starting from having a carbon footprint 77% of the national average, if I could wipe one tonne off my heating impacts and maybe save 20% of my appliance impacts (another 500kg) that would mean I'd made an overall 20% reduction in my own carbon footprint and would be running at 62% of national average (unless everyone else made reductions at a similar rate). This would make my household quite a low-carbon one, would it not?

Well, yes and no. For a start, I have identified 20% of savings but baulked at making much in the way of further reductions, so it's doubtful that I'd successfully continue to make carbon cuts. This is particularly relevant when my commuting impacts are minimal, because if my circumstances changed and I founded I needed to start commuting, that could easily wipe out the other gains I've made.

However, if we look at Counting Consumption we learn that in terms of ecological footprint (of which carbon accounts for about half) then our footprint per capita for food is roughly the same as that for our home and energy. So, by some crude extrapolation of the two information sources I've selected (to avoid delving into the many sources of more accurate information we could look at), we could estimate that my household's food-related carbon impact is about 4 tonnes of carbon per year. Bearing in mind that I try to avoid wasting food, don't each much processed food, do eat out quite often, grow a few of my own vegetables but would be very hard-pressed to give up eating meat, I suspect I need to do some more detailed calculations. But the real, revealing question would be, how much food (and drink) footprint could I save without noticeably giving anything up?

Over the coming months I'm going to test a hypothesis on the basis of my own lifestyle. My hypothesis is kind of threefold:

1) that there is a threshold level of personal, consumption-side carbon emissions that it is very difficult to get below, perhaps somewhere around 6 tonnes per capita per year, without a substantial change in the energy supply mix away from carbon sources;

2) that it is possible to measure and act upon personal influences on supply-side emissions, eg from energy, food, material and transport services, by focusing on the way personal behaviour affects their efficiency and impacts;

3) that this could change the way personal impact is measured and acted upon in the round.

Let's see if I can do it....

AW.

Travel news from Ethical Man

A blog that is well worth following is the BBC's Ethical Man, Justin Rowlatt http://www.bbc.co.uk/blogs/ethicalman/

I was prompted by his recent blog post about our transport emissions to do a little thinking of my own.

Rowlatt was trying - bravely if I may say so - to make a cold-hearted assessment of the relative carbon emission impacts of different modes of travel, and to dispel some of the lazy assumptions. So, for example he found that, on a grammes of carbon per passenger kilometre, one person in a car, a virtually-empty bus or a half-empty train were all at least as bad as flying; and that if you travelled everywhere in a fully laden car you would be giving half-empty trains a real run for their money.

His 'good science' message was, don't just assume that getting a train is a lower carbon option, but think about the full picture. He also had a 'pragmatic logic' message, which was that we should use public transport anyway, because the services will run anyway and by using them we are removing our car emissions and also reducing the emissions per passenger kilometre of the bus or train, by increasing its patronage.

In a sense, I'm with Ethical Man on this, but his rather easy answers to tricky questions left me uncomfortable. After all, isn't "it was going anyway, with or without me" a stock excuse for taking a flight? Hell, I've used it myself. Sure, there's a difference, because if a scheduled flight was regularly empty the airline would withdraw the service, whereas buses and trains are specifically obliged to run services during low-demand times in order to maintain the concept of 'public transport'.

In reality, of course, trains in the UK are becoming so stretched for capacity that finding one that's half-empty is quite an achievement, and pricing structures have been cleverly (if irritatingly) designed to spread passengers across off-peak times. Buses are a bit different, because they do often run quite empty but also seem to burst unhelpfully at the seams whenever there is anything approaching a rush-hour.

Anyway, Ethical Man's analysis set me thinking: perhaps counting our grammes per passenger kilometre isn't actually the best way for us to plan on how to reduce our carbon emissions. Although on the face of it it's the most straightforward calculation, when you look at the variables (how efficient is my car, how full is the train, was the plane going anyway, etc) it's pretty difficult to say with confidence that we've made the best choice for the journey in question.

For a start, the greenest way to make a journey is of course not to make it at all, but that can be inconvenient or just rather unsatisfying. "Darling, let's go out somewhere today - how about going to the market in Buxton?" "No dear, think of the carbon emissions. Let's stay in and watch the lettuces growing in the garden."

No, the more I think about it, the way to think about transport emissions is to think of transport not as a series of thousands of individual choices, but as - dare I say it - a service. Let's say there's a train service running every hour between Sheffield and Leeds for 20 hours a day, with space for 200 passengers. 5 of those trains are full, 10 are half-full and 5 are virtually empty. So 20 trains are transporting just over 2000 passengers. Immediately we can see that spreading passengers from full trains onto half-empty ones won't make any difference. There are only three ways of reducing the per-passenger carbon emissions of the service:

1) carry more passengers in total;

2) make the trains more carbon efficient themselves;

3) withdraw low-demand trains from the service.

The third option is controversial and potentially counter-productive in the long-term, so even though it looks like an inefficiency it may be worth putting up with. The first two options are not controversial but do require all sorts of imaginative solutions, such as how to get commuters to travel at different times instead of travelling by car, and how to make railway vehicles more carbon efficient without vast expense on new rolling stock.

Thinking of each mode of transport as a service to society, rather than as myriad separate choices, has to be helpful, because you can start to see the particulars of each mode. For example in the road-freight industry there must be huge opportunities to tackle the problem of vehicles running empty on return trips: you could actually increase volumes of freight movement and reduce transport-related emissions simultaneously.

Now, how do we apply this to private cars?.....

AW.

Can Science Save Us?

...which reminds me - I recommend anyone in the Sheffield vicinity visits the 'Can Art Save Us?' exhibition at the Millenium Galleries. I may do another blog about it when I'm in the mood.

In my last blog entry I aired some thinking about the ways people believe or disbelieve climate science.

Coincidentally my wife and Green Empire co-director has just started reading Ben Goldacre's book, Bad Science. Visit his website http://www.badscience.net/ The book is basically about health science (or lack thereof) in the media and in marketing of health foods, supplements, cosmetics etc. We've all laughed at TV ads for shampoo with added pro-hypo-filamentorium-12. (Well, I hope we have).

Goldacre's premise is this: people who stand to make vast amounts of money have a habit of concocting misrepresented, bogus or simply invented scientific cases for the health benefits of their products, as well as being, erm, wide of the mark about their own qualifications. (Favourite quote: "Dr Gillian McKeith PhD or, to give her her full medical title, Gillian McKeith....") These products usually turn out to be ineffectual or might, in some cases, actually be harmful. Goldacre's answer is simply: live well, exercise, eat well, and be highly sceptical of apparently scientific claims unless you genuinely understand them.

Now, don't get me wrong - I am not, repeat not, a climate change sceptic. In fact I am worried to near paralysis when I read detailed papers on climate science, and so often avoid reminding myself of how bad things might actually be, for fear of being driven to drink. (Fortunately the pub is 40 seconds walk away so I don't need a chauffeur in any case).

If, on the other hand, I drew all my climate change evidence from the same newspapers, TV programmes and internettage that promote the kind of cod science about health that Ben Goldacre rightly despairs of, I would probably be wise to be suspicious.

In other words, what people tend not to trust is not so much the facts, as the sources. The impressionable amongst us will believe in climate change one week, and dismiss it the next, depending on what they've most recently read or seen on the telly. The more cautious of us will be generally doubtful until they see closely argued and referenced science - and you really, really hav to go looking for that. Especially since a lot of scientific papers are written in a language so dense that, well, you need to be scientist to spot the difference between the kosher and the kodswallop.

We have nurtured a generation that divides into the gullible and the cynical. That climate science appears to inspire doubt is, in this context, probably a good thing, since it implies that people are taking the issue seriously and will become passionate about tackling climate change once they are given impartial evidence from sources they trust.

In my work with WWF a few months ago I found that the ordinary people we interviewed craved impartial, robust information and despaired that they couldn't find it. All information in the public domain is assumed to be biased by political and/or financial motives.

We should put our faith in the wisdom of these ordinary people and do them the service of providing trustworthy information.

AW.

Are you the right age?

According to this weekend's news, I think in The Times, only 41% of people in the UK believe that climate change is man-made.

So only 41% of people believe what scientific consensus tells them. I wonder how many people believe that abstaining from junk food will prolong their lives? Believing something to be fact doesn't make you do anything about it: you have to want to do it at an emotional level. It's a fact that I'd lose weight if I ate less, but I enjoy eating so I tend not to cut down. I do a fair bit of exercise though, but only because I enjoy it.

Equally, you don't have to believe in man-made climate change to do something about it. If the government gave you enough of a financial incentive to insulate your home, you'd do it, even if you weren't struggling with your fuel bills and didn't care where your energy came from. Farmers used to receive subsidies to grow food, so they did so, and if they received subsidies to grow energy crops, they'd do so, whether or not they thought energy crops were morally superior to food. Governments note: people tend to respond better to incentives than penalties, unless those penalties are really punitive. Tax on cigarettes, petrol and alcohol continue to rise without much effect on their (harmful) consumption. But customers love loss leaders and BOGOF deals at supermarkets.

People crave clear equations. Whatever you think about GM foods you will agree that scientific opinion is far less united than it is for man-made climate change. Yet people latched on willingly to the idea that GM was bad - in my view because they could see a straightforward equation: 'don't start growing GM foods, and nothing will go wrong'. Climate change is providing dramatic imagery with every flood and storm, but 'don't start burning oil' is not an option because we opened that particular can of worms a long time ago. So what is the use of acting now?

If people can't see how their own actions could solve a problem, they're unlikely to accept that their actions brought it about. People know that stopping smoking would be good for them, so if they continue to smoke they do so in the knowledge they're doing themselves harm.

People don't trust what they're told by the media or by governments. It's not so long ago that the public was told smoking was actually good for them. I'm too young to know how many people believed that. Now we're told it's bad for us. Should we be surprised that not everyone jumps to attention when the messages we receive are so mixed?

For all this, I think what the statistics really shows is that people struggle to comprehend the timescales over which our activities have an impact. The writer Charles Handy suggests that individuals can only look as far into the future as they have already experienced the past. That's why a 5 year old child finds anyone over about 12 to be unfathomably old. So, climate change targets are being set for 2050, 2080, ie 40-70 years ahead, and the actions we're being held responsible for began at least 200 years ago and accelerated in the past 50 years. Looking back or forward, only people over about 40 or 50 have a frame of reference for the timescales we're talking about.

Then we must add into the mix the fact that, the older someone is, the more they will have been worn down by the endless cycles of apocalyptic scares that never materialised, and by the perpetual sense that life and society has just got gradually worse the longer they've observed it. So their own empirical evidence tells them, that's just the way things are. Life's hard and then you die.

My reasoning is as compelling as it is unscientific. People under, say, 20 are so young in relation to the timescales for which we're apportioning blame and setting targets, that they are just daunted by it all. People over, say, 70 are cynical about whether anyone has any effect on anything. People between 20 and 40 or so are too busy trying to get careers, mortgages, marriages and children to worry much, although they are probably more likely to believe the basic science. So people in the 40-70 age bracket find themselves landed with most of the challenge: understanding the evidence and the timeframe; feeling guilty about their past excesses; affording individual action where it has financial impact; educating their peers and their young, as best they can, in the need to consider the future.

And I would guess (there's science for you) that the 40-70 age bracket is currently about 40% of the population.

The practical lesson of this must surely be that to engage different groups of the population in acting on climate change (or anything else) you need to relate it to a timeframe they can deal with.

AW.