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Sunday, November 24, 2024

2050: More actual real things you (yes, you) can do today

Note: This was also posted on my new Substack page (click here). Please bookmark that page as I may eventually stop posting here.

It is easy to look at the problem of climate change from a citizen’s perspective and throw up your hands in despair, because it appears there is little we can do given the scale of the problem, or because of the perception (perhaps justified) that corporate interests are driving decisions, not citizen’s concerns. But small local efforts add up quickly when taken up by enough people. In this post I hope to provide some positive approaches we can all take.

The first step is to vote, and to research politician’s platforms thoroughly prior to doing so. I have mentioned Mark Jaccard’s book (click here for the free digital version) and my first suggestion is to read it. He cuts though a lot of the obfuscation and gets down to the basic facts. 

The next step is to start to look at changes in your lifestyle that might be beneficial to the planet without being painful to you. Agriculture represents a part of the problem, and eating less meat will help the climate (and perhaps your health as well), but three quarters of the problem is due to the production and use of energy. And everything we do in our industrialised society has an energy impact.

For over 21 years I commuted 65 kilometres daily to work and back. A rough back-of-the-envelope calculation shows this generated about 4 tonnes of CO2 per year, a piddling amount when compared to global energy emissions of about 8.5 billion tonnes (8.5 Gt CO2) from transportation sources in 2020. Today there are options: buy an electric vehicle, take public transit (at the time I could beat public transit on my bicycle), or work from home for some or all of the time. (Cycling a 65 km round trip in urban situations with lots of stoplights added up to close to 3 hours on the road daily, once time for the shower at the office was included. I did it a few times a month, but it was not a daily solution, and was a non-starter in winter weather.) 

Next, let’s look at the grocery store, where I will try not to look like a hippy-dippy, crunchy-granola type wearing socks in my Birkenstocks.

I live in Eastern Canada, a location known for its winters. When I see lettuce on the shelves in February, I guess there has been some energy used to transport it here from somewhere warm, like California. Hopefully that truck will be electrified shortly, and in any case we should not be depriving ourselves of lettuce. But consider mineral or sparkling water shipped from France or Italy in a bottle, frequently made of glass. Yes, marine transport is cheap, but do we not have water in North America? In fact, our property taxes pay for safe and abundant municipal tap water, and any further concerns about the level of safety can be dealt with using a simple replaceable filter at much lower cost. And even if that filter comes from China, the embedded energy of a new filter every few months is presumably a lot lower than for several 750 mL water-filled glass bottles every week. 

Moving on, one also finds imported jams, pickles, etc., on the shelf next to local brands. This 250 mL jar of imported cherry jam weighs in at 579 grams off the shelf, but the empty jar weighs 217 grams with the lid, which works out to 37.5% of the total shipped weight excluding the inevitable carboard box. Every aisle should raise similar concerns or questions.

Outside the grocery store, Chinese goods are cheap, but the energy costs to get them here are significant, not to mention that the low price comes from offshoring well-paid local jobs to low-paid overseas jobs. My own view has always been to buy the best you can afford and look after it; it will last you much longer and cost less over the long run. “Cheap” is actually “expensive”.

At home, we all use energy for heating and cooling. Small steps, such as changing thermostat settings by a degree or two, combined with wearing a sweater and slippers in the winter, can have an impact. If the budget doesn’t allow for more efficient windows or doors, installing or repairing weatherstripping to reduce leaks will still make a difference. Incandescent bulbs use 8 to 10 times more energy than modern LED bulbs, which additionally last 10 times as long before failing. Shutting off the computer or entertainment system when not in use saves more energy than allowing it to go to sleep mode. And while most appliances today are reasonably energy efficient, running energy hogs such as washers, dryers and dishwashers outside peak hours lessens the load on the grid and reduces the investments needed to build new generating capacity. (Peak hours are usually defined as weekdays, 6:00-9:00 and 16:00-20:00, when people are home cooking.)

In a cold climate, however, the bulk of your energy bill is going to be heating. Where I live, the temperature difference in winter between outside and a comfortable inside environment can be as much as 40 or 50 degrees Centigrade; in a hot climate the temperature difference in summer can be 20 degrees or more. (Both depend, obviously, on your thermostat setting). Larger energy efficiency steps include improving insulation any time you are redoing a wall, either from the inside (such as kitchen renovations) our outside (new siding or bricks). Staying with the building envelope, savings from properly insulated basements, attics and modern windows and doors can add up quickly.

Moving inside, heat pumps are typically three times as energy efficient as gas or electric heating and can additionally provide air conditioning in the summer if you don’t already have it. (In the last 10 years, air conditioning in my neck of the woods has gone from a nice-to-have technology to something we can no longer do without.) These are available in ductless form for older homes without forced air, or as an insert to replace a burner or electric element in a forced air system.

Thinking further out there, housing in my neighborhood consists mainly of 100-year old three-story walk-up flats with flat roofs. A very rough first pass shows that the 1000 square foot roof on my building, if carpeted with solar panels, could provide, on average, one third of the building’s power use annually, or enough for roughly one of the three flats. This would need to be paired with local battery storage backed up with a grid connection. It would be expensive, but prices for batteries are dropping along with those for solar panels; meanwhile government incentives (including incentives for the grid operator to allow individual generating capacity to connect to the grid) will be essential. See the recommendation to vote, above, because this would be a huge step to reducing climate change as well as dependence on large generating stations and the necessary transmission lines and transformers.

Of course I am talking here of energy efficiency, not cost efficiency; relative prices for natural gas and electric power are highly local and may serve to slow or accelerate the move to greater electrification. Government carrots (incentives) and sticks (carbon costing of some type) will be essential to get the more expensive but ultimately more effective solutions implemented faster.

And if, through all this, you are saving electricity generated in a hydroelectric station, this can all be justified by the fact you are freeing up power to electrify the vehicle fleet while minimising the need for new dams.  

Moving on to recycling, the industrialised West obviously sends too much stuff to landfill. Recycling can be an option, but recycling comes with energy consumption and, particularly in the case of paper, water use. In the late 1990’s I edited monographs on the topic of energy and water use in pulp and paper processes, including recycling processes, and I would be happy to provide information as needed. So the act of disposing of something, whether a broken toaster or the packaging your groceries or goods came in, also has energy implications. Far better to prioritise repair, recover and reuse before recycling; products that are designed with end-of-life in mind at the start are key to the concept of a circular economy and will become more common as circularity becomes more accepted. Take the time to seek these products out as they become more available.

Finally, going beyond recycling, we have composting and biodegradability. While nice on paper, both lead to CO2 emissions as the organic portion of the raw material decomposes. Use this for food scraps, not “biodegradable” plastic forks.

I realise that much of what I have described here applies to people who own their home and have some financial capacity to invest in goods, services and technologies that might not pay off for a number of years, as well as the ability to pay for healthy foods and high-quality goods which tend to be more expensive. The decisions described here can be difficult if you are having trouble paying the mortgage or buying basic groceries; tenants are at the mercy of a landlord when it comes to investment in energy systems. The social systems needed to generate decent living conditions for all are well documented by a large number of other bloggers on Substack and elsewhere, and are just outside the scope of this blog. Meanwhile you can plan your vote while being mindful of the energy impacts of everyday decisions.

Write to discuss!

 

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