I have been avidly reading the coverage of the Bali talks and wondering how this is going to impact on us. As the various big guns (including Australia) bicker over wording and exactly what they are agreeing to, it seems clear that a 25 - 40% reduction in emissions by 2020 is essential.
In the spirit of this blog being about what we can do as a household, I have set a target that we reduce our household carbon emissions by 40% in the next year.
My first step in doing this was to track down my electricity and gas bills and the log book from our car. I went outside and checked how big our bins are (240 litres for recycling and 120 litres for garbage). Then I sat down for 5 minutes at www.1degree.net.au and worked out our carbon footprint by filling in all the nicely interractive pages.
Our footprint in the year just gone was 17.3 tonnes of CO2. That's more than 3 tonnes over the average in Australia which, as we know, is the highest average in the world.
I just sat there a little flabbergasted for a bit.
The two big factors in that footprint are: household electricity and flights.
Electricity: A few weeks ago I discovered that my new 'green energy' contract was only generating 10% of my power by green means, the rest by conventional coal powered methods. I only worked this out when I got the bill from my new provider, Jack Green, and saw the 10% figure.
I was pretty disappointed that it took me 3 months to work this out, after having signed up with Jack Green believing I was getting green power. Jack Green's door-to-door guy who signed me up explained that I could 'do my bit for the environment' without spending any more money. What he didn't explain to me was that my 'bit' would only be 10% green energy instead of the 100% I was after.
A couple of weeks ago I made the switch to 100% green power, so I plugged that figure into the www.1degree.net.au calculator and our carbon footprint for next year should be down to 7.47 tonnes. We've made a 50% reduction with one phone call!
But here's the tricky bit, the green power will cost us $60 per quarter but we don't have any extra to spend on power. So I have decided we will reduce our consumption accordingly so that our bill remains at the same level even though we are paying more per unit. So that's one target.
Flights:
Simon has done a lot of flying this year for work. He's been to Vietnam, all around Australia and to New Zealand. So I plugged all those flights into the calculator and the figure, for flights alone was over 4 tonnes.
I must say that I am a little bit sceptical of paying money to offset emissions from flights. I'm just not sure where that money goes and who keeps track of exactly how many tonnes of CO2 are being saved. It seems like a bit of a cop out really - how can sending money to someone offset the very real CO2 that is pumped out of the plane and into the atmosphere when I fly tomorrow?
So that is my next task. I am going to research carbon offset schemes and see exactly how they are supposed to work and whether they really have an impact, or whether they are just a way to salve the conscience of well-meaning but ultimately lazy consumers.
So those are my targets: keep the electricity bills at the same $$ level, despite the switch to green power and research and implement carbon offsets for our flights. I will post on the ways we have achieved those things, assuming, of course, that we do.