Live Sustainably Now by Karl Coplan

Author:Karl Coplan
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: SCI026000, Science/Environmental Science, POL044000, Political Science/Public Policy/Environmental Policy
Publisher: Columbia University Press
Published: 2019-12-31T00:00:00+00:00

8

Grappling with the Big Four

Electricity, Heat, Transportation, and Food

Keeping to a 4-ton annual carbon budget (or whatever goal you set) is going to require that you tackle those daily items that add up big at the end of the year—electricity, home heating, getting to work, and food. Some solutions are simple and won’t cost much, at least in the short run. Other solutions involve personal choices and trade-offs, or investing money in home improvements that will pay off in the future. A good target for these big-ticket items is to zero out your electricity footprint and aim for a 1-ton budget each for home heating, work-related commuting, travel, and food.

Let’s take a look at some of the daily big-ticket items and strategies to reduce them. This book focuses on things you can do right now that will bring your current direct footprint into line with global climate necessities. Following a “Mediterranean diet” approach to your carbon footprint, you should try to eliminate the high-fat items from your daily diet but try to leave room to enjoy these things as special, life-enriching treats. The last chapter made clear that long-distance travel has to be one of those rare high-carbon treats in a sustainable carbon diet. We’ll look at travel separately. And our food diet, it turns out, is a big part of our carbon footprint as well. But running our homes (heat and electricity) and getting to work are the biggest carbon footprint items for most people. To bring our individual emissions down to a defensible level, we need to address those items first.

This chapter will look at how we can get these big-ticket items under control in the short term, without major expense or personal dislocation. My goal is to get those daily carbon expenses as close to zero as possible so that there is room in my carbon budget for life-enhancing luxuries like travel. A zero-carbon goal for life’s necessities is good practice, too, because we will need to live on a zero net carbon budget sooner than we think. But we should also consider how these short-term zero-carbon strategies will fare in the longer term, especially if they are adopted by large numbers of like-minded people seeking to reduce their footprint voluntarily or because of government policies (such as carbon fees) that encourage lower carbon emissions. Some actions that are easy to take now may not work in the long term as our entire economy moves toward sustainability.

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