[Greenbuilding] Calculating Carbon Footprint

[Bob Waldrop]

One issue I run in to when calculating carbon emissions is that we heat 
with passive solar and wood.  Our household of 4 buys electricity 
generated by wind (about 11,000 kwh/yr for everything -- hot water, 
summer AC, entertainment, lights, computers, etc).  We use a small 
amount (5 gallons) of propane each month as cooking fuel.

What's the goal we should be shooting for?  i.e. is there a "Kyoto 
Protocol allowance" per household or per capita?

One thing we don't do is fly.  Nobody in our household has flown 
anywhere for years and we've pretty much stopped long distance road 
trips too.  I sometimes go to Tulsa or to my hometown in southwest 
Oklahoma, so we are operating in about a 130 mile radius of our home.  
One car for 3 adults, 1 kid.  Kid gets to walk to school every day.  We 
seem to be losing the desire to travel, lol.  I wrote a friend of mine 
who is a cloistered Benedictine monk about that and he replied, "This 
increased stability in your life is a sign of increased sanity."

Thanks for raising this issue and sharing your resources.

Bob Waldrop, Oklahoma City

On 1/26/2016 1:50 PM, conservation architect wrote:
> I hope the great minds of this list are still out there.
> I am on the Unity with Nature committee of Baltimore Yearly Meeting, a 
> regional Quaker group with Meetings in VA, MD, PA, &WV.  We are 
> wanting to promote our members calculating their personal footprint to 
> give witness to our own actions.   However, I am challenged to find an 
> accurate way to do this.  I hope list participants can contribute.
> Tracking our own carbon footprint is a form of witness to the impact 
> of our own actions.  I have not spent much time on these calculators.  
> However, I do see it similar to the programs that assess house energy 
> efficiency.  Some components of heat loss are straight math.  Where as 
> an assessment of how much the use of energy star appliances saves you 
> is very fuzzy.  When the program has an internal judgment of the 
> impact of the information entered in the form, we are left to trust 
> that unknown metric.
> Using most of the calculators requires that we gather the information 
> in form from which they make judgment about the impact.  Can we 
> ourselves structure our own records to provide us with the information 
> needed to calculate our carbon footprint.  Some information must be 
> extrapolated. However, some information does not.  The cool climate 
> calculator http://coolclimate.berkeley.edu/calculator will ask you 
> what kind of car you use in general terms and miles driven and make an 
> assumption of how much gas you burned.  However, if we wrote down the 
> amount of gas in volume, that would very accurately reflect our carbon 
> emissions with fewer assumptions.  Instead of asking how much money we 
> spend on electricity, we can enter how many kilowatt hours we consume 
> from our bills.  Some mix from the power company sources would be 
> helpful on the extrapolation.  That would be more challenging, but 
> more useful.
> Travel on airlines would depend on actual distances, number of take 
> offs and landings.  I did find a airline specific calculator that 
> offers a line for connecting flights, often greatly increasing the 
> actual miles over the actual distance to the destination.
> This link is a air travel specific calculator that accounts for non 
> direct flights. 
> http://calculator.carbonfootprint.com/calculator.aspx?tab=3
> The cool climate calculator only ask what area of your house is.  This 
> general assumption that square foot size of a house can determine the 
> carbon footprint pretty much puts the whole result in doubt.   This 
> largest component of energy use has a huge variation.
> There are huge variations between real carbon emissions and the 
> assumptions that they use to come up with a number. If we actually 
> entered the natural gas, coal, propane, kerosene purchased, we would 
> get an accurate carbon number for those components. This bypasses the 
> judgment of how efficient your car, home is with a precise number of 
> the result.
> However, it is necessary to extrapolate secondary carbon footprint for 
> the embedded energy in the products we consume.  This is more difficult.
> Food is another large area of impact that is difficult to extrapolate. 
> http://www.foodemissions.com/foodemissions/Calculator.aspx This 
> calculator is very detailed, requiring each item of food be entered.  
> Much more tedious.  However, much more likely to be accurate.
> Establishing a metric where the assumptions are understood would add 
> transparency and integrity to the process.  How to do this is a 
> challenge.
> Can we find a process that is clear enough for us to share and promote?
> Can we rely on the internal metrics of calculators provided online?
> Thank you for making it to the end of this long note.
> This link is a air travel specific calculator that accounts for non 
> direct flights.
> http://calculator.carbonfootprint.com/calculator.aspx?tab=3
> Detailed food calculator: 
> http://www.foodemissions.com/foodemissions/Calculator.aspx
>
>
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