Last call folks.
Jan
Yep, this is it, one last (lengthy) Carbon Neutral Journal post for the record–a decision I should have made a year ago. Instead, I eked out a measly total of 10 posts in 2008, after having written 378 posts in my first year of carbon neutral blogging.
As some of you know, the meager output this past year wasn't because I lost interest or commitment to the topic. Quite the contrary–I simply redirected my time and energy from daily opining to trying to do something about the climate crisis. And I'm pleased to say that the Teton Area 10×10 effort and my new biz, Eco-Logistics, are both making steady progress toward that end.
Teton Area 10×10, our community initiative to reduce energy use by 10% by 12/31/2010, now has 180 people committed to the effort, and the Web site is growing, featuring 28 residential and two business profiles of recent energy use.
On the green event front, after a year of working on a couple of big projects for my former employer and Heatsheets manufacturer AFMInc, my partner, Lee Barrett, and I have our sights set on helping individual events clean up their act and reduce their carbon footprint in 2009. Already signed on are the Austin Marathon and the Lilac Bloomsday Run. With conversations lined up in the coming weeks with a number of other mass participant sporting events, I'm confident that Eco-Logistics will make a positive contribution to event participants' race experiences and the environment in the coming year. Who knows, we may even convince LOTOJA or some ultra-distance running relay to offer participants a way to help offset the huge carbon footprints that are inherent in point-to-point long distance races?
If you're interested in keeping track of what Lee and I are up to, please subscribe to the RSS feed at Eco-Logistics.biz.
For now, let's take one last look at what I've attempted to accomplish over the past two years:
After reducing our home energy use (electricity and natural gas) by 11% from 2006-20007, we slipped a little this year, increasing our home energy use by 3.3% from 2007-2008. My best guess is that some of that is due to the incredibly long winter we experienced (it snowed into June) and the addition of electric radiant heat in our master bathroom (a room we typically didn't heat in the past). The goal for 2009 is to get back to 2007 levels of use and maintain, or improve upon, a 10% reduction in home energy use, in keeping with our commitment to the Teton Area 10×10 initiative.
On the transportation front, we continued to reduce our driving–down to 12,500 miles this year, 20% less than in 2007–and made a switch in vehicles mid-year. No we didn't buy a Prius, but we did realize a significant savings in fuel consumption, simply by switching from our Audi with bikes on top to a mini-van with bikes inside–worth about 20% better mileage on long road trips with the bikes.
One of the reasons for the significant reduction in driving, however, was a corresponding increase in airline travel. In fact, after having not flown at all for over three years, my new biz venture had me flying a fair amount–ironic isn't it, that my venture into environmental consulting would greatly increase my own carbon footprint. According to the flight-by-flight carbon calculator on TerraPass, our flying footprint in 2008 was a whopping 16.5 tons (up from 3828 pounds of co2 in 2007)!
Speaking of TerraPass, one of the most confusing choices I've faced in the past two years is which carbon calculator to use? I started with Al Gore's calculator, but quickly moved on to TerraPass. I've also played with NativeEnergy's calculator, and the one at ZeroJH (supplied by Bonneville Environmental Foundation).
Much as I wanted to support ZeroJH and the Solar4Schools program, I found the ZeroJH tool to be the most approximate in its calculations. Al Gore's calculator said our 2008 co2 footprint was 16.7 tons (down from the original calculation of 17.5 tons in 2006), and referred me to NativeEnergy to purchase offsets totaling $233.80. TerraPass calculated our footprint at 17.5 tons, and the bill came to $208.25.
In the end, I went with the TerraPass calculator for a couple of reasons: it allows you to calculate the co2 impact of flying on a flight-by-flight basis, and it allows you to enter specific mileage data for any number of cars, by year, make and model–none of the other calculators provide this level of detail.
One note: in addition to the $208.25 paid to TerraPass to offset our carbon footprint, we choose to pay Lower Valley Energy $17.50/month to fully offset our electrical use with an investment in GreenPower.
bottom line:
$418.25, 20% less driving and a continued focus on managing home energy use got Alisan and me to carbon neutral for 2008.
We'll continue to work to reduce our carbon footprint in 2009 as we watch our country turn a page in the history book and, hopefully, pay more attention to the pressing state of the climate crisis than we have in the past.
Best wishes for a healthy and happy new year!
Popularity: 11%

