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How Much CO2 Do You Emit?

Jill

Calculate away.

I emit 6100 pounds of Co2 each year, which is less than half of what the average American does (average: 15,000 pounds). And most of mine comes from flying home to Seattle once or twice a year. But then, I don’t exactly live like the “average American.” I share a small apartment with a room mate, and I live in a city with great public transportation, so I don’t have a car. If I had kids, or if I couldn’t afford to live in a pricey urban area (which, as a student, I barely can), I doubt my emissions would look quite the same.

Amanda has a great post up about what people in all kinds of different situations can do for the enivronment. Some ideas, from her post, this website, and my own pretty little head:

-Wear cool clothes in the summer and open your windows instead of turning on the AC in the summer (obviously, this isn’t possible everywhere, especially in humid climates and in places like offices, where there are lots of people)
-Throw an extra comforter on your bed in the winter instead of cranking the heat up
-When you use heat/AC in your home, moderate it. Keep it cool in the summer, but not freezing. Keep it warm in the winter, but not so hot that you have to walk around in shorts and a tank top.
-Reduce your meat consumption. You don’t have to go vegetarian or vegan (I abandoned vegetarianism after 10 years, so I’m not going to lecture anyone on that), but cutting down how much meat you eat (especially red meat) is good for the environment and even better for your body. And if possible, swear off the fast food.
-Plant a garden. Try growing some of your own vegetables.
-If you can, walk, bike, or take public transportation to work. If work is too far to walk, biking is a great idea, and will relieve you of the need to go work out in the evening or on the weekends. And it doesn’t have to be a daily thing — even riding to work once or twice a week helps.
-If you own your home, try installing solar screens. They’ll cut down your electricity bills, too.
-Use compact flourescent lightbulbs. They’re a more expensive, but they last much longer than regular lightbulbs, making them cheaper in the long run.
-Dry your clothes on a clothesline. This isn’t possible for a lot of people, and I definitely can’t do it in New York, but it’s a good idea nonetheless. And one of my favorite things about living in Europe is the clothesline-dried clothes. They smell better, they’re not wrinkley, your sheets are crisper… it’s great.
-Unplug your cellphone charger, computer and television when you aren’t using them. Just having them plugged in wastes energy.
-Only run your dishwasher if it’s full. If you live alone or with just one or two other people, try washing your dishes by hand.
-Insulate and weatherize your home
-Recycle
-Buy fresh foods instead of frozen
-Buy locally-produced foods. If there’s a farmer’s market nearby, buy your produce there.
-Keep your car tires properly inflated, and have your car inspected regularly.

And there are a million more ideas. This is obviously a list to pick and choose from — few people can do everything it recommends. And unfortunately, many of these options are only available to people of a certain income level. If you live in an urban area and the local bodega is your nearest grocery store, your access to fresh fruits and veggies probably isn’t the best. If you rent your home instead of own it, it’s a lot harder to install solar panels or new windows or demand that the heat is kept low in the entire building. If you have to drive your kids around town all day, it’s harder to be part of a carpool, or to spend the extra time walking or biking to and from work.

But I think it’s fair to say that everyone can do something to reduce the amount of waste they produce, and the amount of CO2 they omit. Feel free to add more suggetsions in the comments.

10 thoughts on How Much CO2 Do You Emit?

  1. I can’t believe how much carbon air travel generates. If we’re going to subsidize airlines so heavily, we should make them cut their emissions. You’d think that might have been something Gore could have accomplished as VP.

    Are you living in the student housing and counting your utilities as zero?

  2. I can’t believe how much carbon air travel generates. If we’re going to subsidize airlines so heavily, we should make them cut their emissions. You’d think that might have been something Gore could have accomplished as VP.

    Are you living in the student housing and counting your utilities as zero?

  4. BTW the solar generation thing – which is a great idea for lots of reasons beyond CO2 emissions – is something that snobby suburban homeowner associations frequently ban (along with other alternatives such as small wind turbines). My friend (and web host) provided this great rant on the subject.

    I don’t understand why governments insist on subsidizing airlines. They can be profitable anyway, all subsidizing does is keep a bunch of airline employees in that line of work instead of hunting for another job. About the only justification for subsidy is connecting the truly remote parts of the country to the rest of it and even that needs to be looked at carefully if it results in a bunch of people living out in the sticks and (essentially) comuting via plane to their jobs.

  5. Apparently mine is average through the spring, summer and early fall when we don’t have to heat with oil, but during the winter months it’s ridiculously high. I was at average until I put in winter heating costs. The problem we have, I think, is that living in an old drafty farmhouse wastes a lot of energy/fuel. What we’re doing to combat it is taking one room at a time, re-insulating and re-drywalling so that it holds in more heat. The next step is going to be to replace all the windows. It’s a pain in the rear end, however and A LOT of work. Hopefully it will cut down on our energy waste though. We also do other things to combat it, we don’t turn on lights until it’s absolutely necessary, we put the computer on standby if we step away from it, we use air conditioning in only one room of the house and only if it’s really, really hot. My husband is pretty much the most anal retentive person I’ve ever met when it comes to stuff like energy costs, so ours are pretty reasonable for the most part.

  6. Hmmm. This calculator unfortunately only has US states, and I can’t figure out what would be closest in energy generation types, climate, etc, to my actual home (Ottawa, On). The same behaviours in Michigan and NY, for instance, leave my carbon impact at 5900 (Michigan) and 3100 (NY).

  7. “And one of my favorite things about living in Europe is the clothesline-dried clothes. They smell better, they’re not wrinkley, your sheets are crisper… ”

    Crisper? Must be something in the local air. Putting them out on the line doesn’t make my sheets crunchy, and my experience has been that clothes are less wrinkly from the dryer.

  9. Buy organic foods as much as possible
    Organic soils capture and store carbon dioxide at much higher levels than soils from conventional farms. If we grew all of our corn and soybeans organically, we’d remove 580 billion pounds of carbon dioxide from the atmosphere!

    Bullshit (pun intended). Carbon dioxide sequestration depends on the amount of organic matter in the soil, with “organic” having the standard chemical meaning of “carbon based” and having very little to do with which pesticides are used on the fields. Read here http://ohioline.osu.edu/aex-fact/0510.html for more info.

    If we grew all of our corn and soybeans organically we’d run into trouble finding enough water to grow them all. Organically grown crops have lower yields than conventionally grown crops, meaning you have to plant more fields to get the same amount of food at the end. More fields means more land use and more water use. You also need land and water to produce all the plants from which the organic pesticides are produced.

    Most of that corn and soybean crop goes to feed livestock, not humans. We could reduce the amount of water we use and the amount of carbon we release simply by eating less meat.

  10. One (controversial) thing that I think gets overlooked is that folks should have fewer children if they’re concerned about the environment or about CO2 emissions. If somebody really wants to raise children, there’s always adoption. It’s like buying a hybrid car: it’s more expensive for you, but better in a global sense.

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