[kublikhan]

I was just curious what personal changes people have made to lower your carbon footprint/energy consumption, if any.

I personally have done only modest adjustments:
* reduced meat consumption
* reinsulated house
* new efficient HVAC system with programmable thermostat
* more moderate settings on thermostat(less heating in winter, less cooling in summer)
* water saving shower/toilet
* new Energy Star windows
* replaced incandescent bulbs with fluorescent/led bulbs
* still driving a Corolla, but a bit slower now
* occasionally Telecommute

There were more ideas here: how to reduce your carbon footprint

Or if you went the JBoogy route, I'd like to hear about that too

$this->bbcode_second_pass_quote('JBoogy', 'A') lot of the people here are tofu-munching, bike-rider types, just look at the introduction, get to know me forum/thread. Lots of guys on bikes. They'd be pissin' and moanin' about SUV's and powerplants no matter how much oil was in the ground. They're simple relics of a by-gone era, they secretly wish everyone had to live like the Amish, then they would rule because of their mastery of the bicycle and cell-phone. I on the other hand live like the party will never end, me and mine have crude-oil fueled bonfires every friday night, we roast endangered species and breath tar soot while bad-mouthing Al Gore. Join us, we can come out of PO smellin' like a rose if we can recruit enough converts. We'll flay the menfolk and enslave the women. All will bow before us and our biodiesel fueled Hummers, or they will perish in our bio-fuel rendering vats. Either way we win.

[Shaved Monkey]

Biggest thing was moving to a well designed house in the subtropics so no need for heating or cooling.
Not much need for lots of imported clothing.(t shirt shorts and sandals most of the year)
Solar power and water
All appliances are the highest energy rating I can afford.
Replaced most globes to Led
Low flush Toilets and low flow showers
4 x Water tanks
Drive only about $300 worth of fuel a year.
Grow as much of my food as I can.

Its pretty low not quite 3rd world low, but very low for 1st world

[sparky]

.
nothing at all , live the way I have and just enjoy it

[Pops]

I'd say probably the biggest thing was to stop pushing the merry-go-round.
My average income the 5 years prior to 2004 was over $100k and the last 5 was <= $25k.
Most of that was on purpose. Like an alcoholic that just can't have a bottle in the cupboard, I just can't have a dollar in the bank.

Though, like JBoogie said about treehuggers; I would have done it anyway, PO or no, but PO (and bubbles) prompted me to do it in my 40s rather than 50s or 60s.

--
I think I get brownie points for rehabbing an old house rather than building a new one - though many many trips to town for materials may offset that some, LOL. But the old place is much tighter and with modern systems and a repaired envelope, it is good for at least another 50 years (with always: "just a little more work").

--
Likewise working from home rather than commuting.
Usually that means more energy use at home for daytime occupation (that is less efficient than an multi-person office) but my wife has always been home anyway so no real change in energy use at home = net savings.

--
But honestly the motivation behind most of my work has been resilience rather than carbon reduction. I'm a Jeavon-ite in that I don't believe me saving alone (sans regulations) constitutes a net savings since it only enables someone else to consume more. Likewise a Darwinian in that my changes may improve the survival of my genes' - such as they are.

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[kublikhan]

Yeah most of my changes had other motivations as well. I reduced meat consumption for health reasons. Most others to save some money on energy costs.

[Logic]

I also have cut down on red meat and prefer locally grown foods and restaurants that use local goods.
We have built a very energy efficient house which hits the 2030 goals.
However, it is too big, so we are planning our next house much more carefully. This one will be net zero.

We promote energy efficiency at many events, and support non-profits that are working to cut coal use and increase renewables.

I enjoy showing people that you can increase efficiency without cutting quality of life. It tends to get a lot more people on board.

[KaiserJeep]

This did not all happen at once, but versus a decade ago, I have:

1) Reduced the miles I personally drive from approximately 15,000 annually to less than 1,500. This is in a 2003 Jeep Wrangler Rubicon, a modified 4400lb SUV that gets 11mpg average in the city. The 1,500 miles is divided between 1,100 highway miles on vacation (@ 17mpg) and 400 miles local driving (@ 11mpg). My vacations are all four wheeling, the 13,500 miles saved at 11mpg (i.e. my former commute) is approximately 1230 gallons of regular grade gasoline per year.
My wife still commutes to work and shops with her Jeep, a 2001 Grand Cherokee Limited, which although heavier gets better mileage than the Wrangler. She uses 720 gallons/year.

2) In between the full commute and the full teleworker status, I had several years where I drove the Wrangler about 3500 miles annually while (mostly) commuting by CALTRAIN and Santa Clara Transportation Authority Light Rail. As I have said before, I have NO IDEA how to calculate carbon saved when commuting by rail.

3) As of last month, I have had 2.8kW of solar panels on my roof and in operation as a grid-connected solar PV system for 4 years. The (somewhat suspect) figures my solar vender (Sunrun) gives for my system impacts annually are: 5757 lbs carbon dioxide, or the equivalent of 67 trees planted, or the equivalent of 5977 miles driven (in the USA average 20.4mpg passenger car).

I have made no attempt to calculate the embedded energy in those PV panels. Aluminum frames and mounting rails, stainless steel hardware, silicon mono-crystaline wafers, copper wires, petroleum source plastic insulation and passivating films, all from China. The power Inverter, electrical meter, cellphone modem, and electrical hardware/conduits etc. are all US-made.

4) We have switched to virtually all locally grown organic produce via the local Farmer's Market, the organic chicken/beef/pork and the wild seafood from COSTCO, and get miscellaneous packaged goods - including far too much processed sugars - from a local supermarket.

The wife and I decided to forgo expensive vacations and new cars to expedite paying off the mortgage and moving to (or building) a retirement home in the MidWest. Basically I need to work two years and two weeks from today to qualify for Medicare, the Obamacare alternatives available to highly paid Silicon Valley workers are not attractive. But if I get laid off, I already am past the minimum age for penalty-free access to my 401K. The wife is younger, she needs to work four years and six months to reach the same Medicare availability, and her retirement eligibility is somewhat complex because she has a variety of retirement accounts.

Hoping the economy limps along without imploding for 5-6 years.

[Newfie]

So.....I know this guy who lives in a small condo in center city, has no car, walks or takes a bus anywhere. He does his footprint and is astounded to find that even at his low level of consumption it is still something like 1.5 Earths.

Why?

I think that is because the true global footprint is much different than what we normally think about. As noted in all the posts above we tend to think about the most obvious ways we use energy, but it's the secondary ways that we can't control so directly that are the real killers.

To get my point try to make a list of ALL the energy sinks in our society.

Think: hospitals, road construction, TSA, schools/collages, sewage plants, police, military, your office, football teams & stadiums, mass transit........etc.....

I think what the Footprint Network does is just take all this distributed energy and divide it out over the population. To say this another way, if we all reduced our PERSONAL energy use to zero we would still be over the limit.

Shaved Monkey and Pops both come closer to the truth in their posts, perhaps without realization, perhaps with. Shaved notes he has moved to a subtropical clime and thus uses no heat or AC. That is huge because it is a rare thing to do. Surely we can't ALL move to such a regional and those that can't then must pay the bill for climate control. Sure a few will get to build new zero energy houses, but that is not a solution for the masses living in high rise condos in the heart of our cities. We collectively don't have the resources to destroy our current housing stock and start over again with all zero energy housing.

Pops talks about reducing his income, and that is really HUGE. I would like to see the relationship between a dollar spent, on average, and calories of fossil fuel used. I'm guessing there is a pretty linear relationship between what you spend and the amount if fuel usage you are responsible for.

But the other side of that is paying taxes, I also believe that, directly or indirectly, there is a pretty linear relationship between your tax dollars and and how much energy usage you are responsible for. Just think of the things your tax dollars buy and that mostly represents expended energy. That is kind of a brutal relationship when talking about social services. But the truth is when your tax dollars are used for SNAP cards that money is going eventually to farmers who are sucking up fossil fuels. Kinda sucks.

I'm offering no criticisms or solutions, I think we are beyond that, at least on a broad level.

I do applaud what each has done to improve their own contribution. I just wanted to think a bit more systematically about whole shebang.

For ourselves, we live in about 800 sq ft, 1887 building. We have heat, but no AC. I walk to work but my Wife works out of the house. When not working, every other week (sorta) we live on a sailboat with wind and solar power. In that way we are energy neutral. In the winter we have forced hot air heat. That is our really big energy suck. I have reduced my work hours, and thus my taxes. I hope that when we retire we will sail south and enjoy the comfortable climate Shaved describes. But make no mistake we have put a TON of energy and money and fossil fuel into the boat to make it what it is. And in that way we have been energy hogs.

[dolanbaker]

Checking out at the store, the young cashier suggested to the much older lady that she should bring her own grocery bags,because plastic bags are not good for the environment.

The woman apologized to the young girl and explained, "We didn't have this 'green thing' back in my
earlier days."

The young clerk responded, "That's our problem today. Your generation did not care enough to save our environment for future generations."

The older lady said that she was right -- our generation didn't have the"green thing" in its day. The older lady went on to explain:

Back then, we returned milk bottles, soda bottles and beer bottles to the store. The store sent them back to the plant to be washed and sterilized and refilled, so it could use the same bottles over and over. So they really were recycled.
But we didn't have the "green thing" back in our day.
Grocery stores bagged our groceries in brown paper bags that we reused for numerous things. Most memorable besides household garbage bags was the use of brown paper bags as book covers for our school books. This was to ensure that public property (the books provided for our use by the school) was not defaced by our scribbling. Then we were able to personalize our books on the brown paper bags. But, too bad we didn't do the "green thing" back then.

We walked up stairs because we didn't have an escalator in every store and office building. We walked to the grocery store and didn't climb into a 300-horsepower machine every time we had to go two blocks.

But she was right. We didn't have the "green thing" in our day.

Back then we washed the baby's nappies because we didn't have the throw away kind.
We dried clothes on a line, not in an energy-gobbling machine burning up 220 volts. Wind and solar power really did dry our clothes back in our early days.
Kids got hand-me-down clothes from their brothers or sisters, not always brand-new clothing.
But that young lady is right; we didn't have the "green thing" back in our day.
Back then we had one TV, or radio, in the house -- not a TV in every room. And the TV had a small screen the size of a handkerchief(remember them?), not a screen the size of the state of Montana. In the kitchen we blended and stirred by hand because we didn't have electric machines to do everything for us. When we packaged a fragile item to send in the mail, we used wadded up old newspapers to cushion it, not styrofoam or plastic bubble wrap. Back then, we didn't fire up an engine and burn gasoline just to cut the lawn. We used a push mower that ran on human power. We exercised by working so we didn't need to go to a health club to run on treadmills that operate on electricity.

But she's right; we didn't have the "green thing" back then.

We drank from a fountain when we were thirsty instead of using a cup or a plastic bottle every time we had a drink of water. We refilled writing pens
with ink instead of buying a new pen, and we replaced the razor blades in a razor instead of throwing away the whole razor just because the blade got dull.

But we didn't have the "green thing" back then.

Back then, people took the tram or a bus and kids rode their bikes to school or walked instead of turning their mums into a 24-hour taxi service in the
family's $45,000 SUV or van, which cost what a whole house did before the"green thing." We had one electrical outlet in a room, not an entire bank of sockets to power a dozen appliances. And we didn't need a computerized gadget to receive a signal beamed from satellites 23,000 miles out in space in order to find the nearest burger joint.

But isn't it sad the current generation laments how wasteful we old folks were just because we didn't have the "green thing" back then?

[Pops]

Don't confuse "back then" with "the green thing."

Given the wealth, those folks would have been just as wasteful. Oil fueled technology has made us so rich we can pretend to be green and it costs us nothing.



.

[kublikhan]

$this->bbcode_second_pass_quote('Newfie', 'P')ops talks about reducing his income, and that is really HUGE. I would like to see the relationship between a dollar spent, on average, and calories of fossil fuel used. I'm guessing there is a pretty linear relationship between what you spend and the amount if fuel usage you are responsible for.

[KaiserJeep]

$this->bbcode_second_pass_quote('Newfie', '-')snip-
But make no mistake we have put a TON of energy and money and fossil fuel into the boat to make it what it is. And in that way we have been energy hogs.

[Plantagenet]

$this->bbcode_second_pass_quote('kublikhan', '[')url=http://www.businessinsider.com/the-energy-limit-model-2011-6]Here's What Happens When US Energy Spending Passes 9% Of GDP[/url]

[Plantagenet]

Alaskans have the largest energy and carbon footprints on the planet because heating in the Arctic is so expensive, because everything has to be imported to Alaska, and because travel within alaskan and to other places is so expensive.

Personally, I'm just finishing a big project upgrading my heating system and super-insulating my house. The State of Alaska has a fund that reimburses residents who make these kinds of energy-efficiency improvements. This should cut my heating oil use by ca. 30% and reduce my carbon footprint dramatically.

[kublikhan]

$this->bbcode_second_pass_quote('Plantagenet', 'T')here is no hard-and-fast limit keeping energy expenditures below 9% of GDP in the US economy.

[Shaved Monkey]

My primary motivation was to save money
The less I spend on burning fossils, makes me richer, without having to work harder/longer to do it.
Feels good being "green" to.

... and I genuinely do like the taste of kale and it grows like a weed.
win win

[MD]

How much garbage are you leaving in your wake? Start first by reducing this as much as you can.

How many miles do you drive a year? Reduce them to minimum and be extremely efficient in what miles you have to consume.

Be OK with being a little too hot or a little too cold.

When building infrastructure, take the longest view possible. Remember the pig that built with stone.

Those are the things I do to reduce my carbon footprint. I still burn way too damn much.

[Newfie]

Shaved, that's the spirt! Two ways to get rich...earn more.... Or ....spend less.

Kub....thanks for the info but I have a question. Not sure if I can phrase it right. My gut tells me that our energy expenditures, if accurately reflected, would be much higher. Pet me talk about something I know a bit about, boats.

So I but a fiberglass yacht. Does this count against energy use? The damn thing is nearly 100% fossils fuel reworked from the resins in the hull to the polyesters in the sails, to the nylon in the ropes. The engine is a block of iron that was dug up, refined, melted, cast, shaped, and shipped. The electronics are themselves marvels of the fuel age. A chip for my chart plotter can cost $200, but that is mostly funny money for the human labor to program it. Other than that it's hard to think of something in that boat that's not based on fossil fuel.

How much of that fossil fuel is reflected in the 10% number?