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YOUR CARBON FOOTPRINT What is your carbon footprint? We hear the term “Carbon Footprint” mentioned all of the time in the press, but how may of us know what it means---not very many. I will use an analogy to explain it. Consider your trash footprint. As you walk along in life, you eat a candy bar and throw the wrapper behind you. You drink a soda, you throw the can behind you. When you look back, you see your trash behind you---this is your trash footprint. In the same fashion, when you generate carbon dioxide, you leave that carbon dioxide behind you, as your carbon footprint. However, your carbon footprint it not visible, and it is many thousands of times larger than your trash footprint. The average person generates 4.6 pounds of trash per day, which is 1679 pounds per year. For a family of four, the typical Florida family, this is 6716 pounds per year. Your carbon footprint is several thousands of times larger than this, but once again , you do not see it, so you ignore it. What constitutes your carbon Footprint? Your carbon foot print is composed of many things, but primarily, it composed of four categories. These are (1) the air we breath, (2) miscellaneous stuff such as food growing, entertainment, etc. , (3) transportation, and (4) electricity. The first two are very small in comparison the last two. The air we breath accounts for about 800 pounds per year and miscellaneous stuff, such as entertainment accounts for and additional 2,000 pounds per year. The other two categories, transportation and electricity, account for approximately 93%of your carbon footprint and will be discussed in detail here. Transportation Transportation accounts for tens of thousands of pounds per year of your carbon footprint. It consists of operation of your personal automobile, your recreation vehicles, your air travel and the transportation that is conducted on your behalf such as food delivery, package delivery, police cars, government vehicles doing your bidding, jet fighters that serve our country, the president traveling around the country in “Air Force One”, garbage trucks, recycling trucks, trains that deliver coal, autos, and other heavy things, tugboats on the Mississippi river, emergency vehicles, etc. It is possible to account for your carbon footprint for your transportation, but it is difficult to divide all of the other generators of carbon dioxide, due to transportation to that amount attributable to you. Consequently, we will generate the carbon footprint for your direct transportation and estimate the others. Determining the amount of carbon dioxide produce directly from you vehicles is very simple. Estimate the number of miles that you drive each year,(divide the number of miles on your odometer by the number of years that you have owned the vehicle), divide by the miles per gallon that your vehicles gets---If you do not know this number, go to the internet and get the data for your auto. This will give you the number of gallons that you burn each year. Multiply this number by 20 pounds per gallon (the pounds of carbon dioxide generated when you burn a gallon of gasoline or diesel). For those of you who are mathematically challenged, use Table 1. Look down the left column until you come to the number of miles that you drive that auto each year. Look along that line until you come to the column that corresponds to the mileage of that auto, in miles per gallon. The number in that box is the number of pounds of carbon dioxide generated by that auto each year. Yup---it is a very big number!!! For example, if you drive 20,000 miles per year and your auto gets 20 Miles per gallon, your carbon footprint for that auto is 20,000 pounds per year. Now, do the same for your other auto---almost every family has two autos. Then add in your motor home, your boat, and any other autos. The average family of four in Florida is going to come up with over 30,000 pounds of carbon dioxide due to their autos and recreational vehicles. Now, for the surprising part of your carbon footprint---your air travel. Because you share your ride with 150 other air travelers and because you travel at 500 miles per hour, your carbon footprint for air travel is lower per mile than your personal auto. The jet may be burning 500 gallon per hour, but the pounds of carbon dioxide per mile is very low. Use the 40 miles per gallon column for air travel. If you travel 50,000 per year, per family member, your carbon footprint will be 25,000 pounds per year, per family member. Lets look at a typical family of four in Florida. Auto #1. 20,000 per year at 20 MPG = 20,000 pounds per year of carbon Auto #2. 15,000 per year at 25 MPG = 12,000 pounds per year of carbon Other vehicle, boat (estimated) = 2,000 Air Travel. 10,000 per year = 5,000pounds per year of carbon. ------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------ Total Direct Carbon Production = 39,000 pounds per year of carbon. Indirect(Police, Air Force, Package Delivery, Food Delivery, etc) est. at 10,000 pounds per year. TOTAL DUE TO TRANSPORTATION = 49,000 pounds per year. By the way, this is a good time to look at the effect of the “CLUNKERS” for cash program. What is it’s effect on the total carbon footprint of the nation, and on the total amount of gasoline per year. The “clunkers” program involved 690,000 vehicles. Let us assume that each clunker vehicle was getting 15 MPG and drove 15,000 miles per year. These clunkers would have had a carbon footprint of 20,000 pounds of carbon dioxide per year. If the replacement vehicles got 25 MPG, and still drove 15,000 miles per year, their carbon footprint would have been 12,000 pounds per year. This is 8,000 pounds per year less. If we multiply 8,000 pounds per year times 690,000 vehicles, we get 5.52 billion pounds of carbon dioxide less per year because of the “CLUNKERS” program. At 20 pounds per gallon of gas, this would be 276 million gallons of gas saved per year because of the “CLUNKERS” program. Keep in mind that this figure will be valid for all of the ensuing years, provided that Detroit does not produce more “CLUNKERS”. Not bad for a government program. Data in the newspaper suggest that the “CLUNKERS” program cost 2.2 billion dollars. This is about 40 cents per pound of carbon dioxide removed from the air. Later on in this article, we will see that that is slightly less than the cost of removing carbon dioxide using solar hot water heaters.
Electricity Electricity consumed in Florida is approximately 51% by domestic users and 49% by industrial, commercial, and service users. For the purposes of this article, let’s assume that half is by domestic and half is by other. We will look at the amount of electricity attributable to a family of four, and provide a means of calculating how much your carbon footprint is from electricity. Grab up your electricity bills for the last 12 months, add them up and then divide them by 12. This will give you your average monthly electric bill. If you do not have these data handy, just use your last electric bill. Multiply that bill by 170. This figure is calculated by using 12 cents per kilowatt hour and 1.7 pounds of carbon dioxide produced for every kilowatt hour that is delivered to your home. If you lived in Washington state, this figure would be 0.36 pounds of carbon dioxide produced for every kilowatt hour of electricity delivered to your home. This is because 72% of their power is produced from hydro-electric power. For our typical family of four, an average bill would be $200.00. That is probably low, but we will use if for our example. $200.00 times 170 is 34,000. This is the pounds of carbon dioxide that is attributable directly to your electric usage. For those of you who are mathematically challenged, use Table 2. Keep in mind that this is the direct carbon footprint from your electricity usage. The indirect portion is that associated with the electricity used in your workplace, the Wal-Mart store, Publix, your favorite restaurant, your favorite sports event, etc. Consequently, you must double your direct electricity footprint. This would be 34,000 times 2 = 68,000 pounds per year. Totaling your carbon footprint For a family of four: Respiration 800 X 4 people = 3,200 pounds per year Entertainment, etc. 2,000 X 4 people = 8,000 pounds per year Transportation 49,000 pounds per year Electricity 68,000 pounds per year -------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------- TOTALS 128,200 pounds per year
This is a mighty big number---it makes your trash footprint look like a drop in the bucket. However, because this footprint is invisible to us, we generally ignore it. Checking on this figure, I went to www.eredux.com , which lists carbon footprints for various states. The report 15 tons of carbon footprint for every man, woman and child in Florida. Dividing the above figure, 128,200 pounds per year, by 4 people in our 4 person family, we get s32050 pounds per person, whis is 16.1 tons per year per person. This is acceptable agreement.
Plant Regeneration Most of us just ignore our carbon footprint, because we know that the plants will absorb this carbon dioxide and we do not have to worry about it. HOW WRONG YOU ARE!!!! Let us take a look at the ability of our plants to absorb (or chelate as the jargon goes) this carbon dioxide. There are 18.3 million people in Florida, divided by our family of 4 equals 4.575 million family units, each generating 128,200 pounds of carbon dioxide. Multiplying these figure out, (4.575 million times 128,200) we get 587 billion pounds of carbon dioxide generated in Florida each year. It is generally accepted that row crops have the ability to absorb or chelate 2,000 pounds of carbon dioxide per year. Lets assume that Florida can better that number by 50% and our plants can absorb or chelate 3,000 pounds per acre. Florida has a land area of 65,795 square miles or 42,108,800 acres. This is all of Florida’s area, including lakes, roads, houses, shopping centers and plant areas. Assuming that all of this land area is available for carbon dioxide chelation, Florida could absorb 126 billion pounds of carbon dioxide per year. Dividing this number into the 587 billion pounds of carbon dioxide that we produce every year, we see that we need 4.6 Florida’s to absorb the carbon dioxide that we produce each year. It is the same with all of the other states in the Union, and that is the reason that the carbon dioxide levels are rising every year in the USA and the world. Where does all of this excess carbon dioxide go?? Mostly, it goes into the waters. Carbon dioxide is highly soluble in water and forms the weak acid called carbonic acid. Thirty years ago when I was doing water analysis, the pH of distilled water was 5.7. Neutral is 7.0. Today, it is lower than that, because the level of carbon dioxide in the air is much higher. This lower pH level will dissolve limestone and our coral reefs. That is why there is the concern for rising levels of carbon dioxide. The portion that does not go into the water, mixes with the atmosphere, causing the carbon dioxide levels to rise and causing the greenhouse effect. For those of you who do not know what the greenhouse effect is---it is what happens in a green house where you grow plants. The sunlight comes down through the glass. Some of it is absorbed by the plants but a lot of it is converted into infrared light. This is basically heat. This infrared light cannot go back up through the glass and consequently the green house is heated. Carbon dioxide in the atmosphere acts as though it is glass. The more carbon dioxide, the more it acts like glass, holds the heat in our atmosphere and causes global warming. What should we be doing?? Let’s review where our carbon footprint comes from using the typical family in Florida. For a family of four, 2.4% comes from our respiration. We cannot stop breathing, so we must ignore this figure. 6.2% comes from entertainment, etc. We must have reason to live, and our entertainment enhances that reason---lets ignore this figure also. 38.2% of our carbon footprint comes from our transportation and 53.2% comes from electricity production and use. We must do something about transportation and electricity because they represent 91.4% of our total carbon footprint and they are the easiest to adjust. My family has three vehicles. The highest carbon producer is a 1995 Ford Ranger that gets only about 20 MPG. We traded this vehicle, this month, for a Pruis that gets an average mileage of just over 50 MPG. Lets use the 50 MPG figure. Referring to Table 1, we see that at 20MPG for 15,000 miles per year, we were producing 15,000 pounds of carbon dioxide. At 50 MPG and the same miles per year, we are producing 6,000 pounds of carbon dioxide. We reduced our carbon footprint by 9,000 pounds per year with this vehicle. For those of you who race from one stop light to another, if you would drive in a more energy conservative style, you could reduce your carbon footprint by more than 1,000 pounds per year. It would also save you more than $100 per year in gasoline. Reducing the number of miles you drive per year also reduces your carbon footprint. There is not much you can do to reduced the transportation footprint attributable to trucking companies, police departments, food distributors, other than telling the responsible parties to get more fuel efficient vehicles. Encourage our government officials to buy vehicles that get 35 or more miles per gallon? As you can see, there are a host of questions and practices that we can challenge when we have good carbon footprint data. Electricity costs comprise 53.2% of our carbon footprint. There is a lot of things we can do to reduce this portion of our carbon footprint. The most important in Florida, is to just set the thermostat to 78 degrees or higher. In my home if we set the thermostat at 78 degrees, we would have to wear coats. We do not like air conditioning, but we must use it to keep the mold from forming on our clothes, and to keep us relatively comfortable on hot days. Most of the time our thermostat is set at 80 degrees or higher and our electricity bill is lower than most---normally averaging $125 to $150 per month. There are lots of other energy saving tips---most of them advanced by your electric utility. Get on the internet and look them up. Insulation in our attics is the best energy saver. We saved a lot of electricity by just installing two more gable vents in our attic. This dropped our electricity usage for air conditioning by more than 5 kilowatt-hours per day. For those of you who want to go further, solar hot water heating is the best way to go. A solar hot water heater costs about $4500.00, saves you between $60 and $100 per month and reduces you carbon footprint by 6,000 to 9,.0000 pounds per year. It has a return of about 14% and the State of Florida will give you a $500 rebate when you install it---be prepared to wait for up to or in excess of 1 year for the rebate. This single 4 foot by 10 foot solar hot water heating panel on your roof has an equivalent energy production rate of 3.3 kilowatts. If it produces hot water all of the time that the sun shines (most do not because most families do not use that much hot water), then you would save 10,238 pounds per year of carbon dioxide. At an initial cost of $4,500, this yields a cost of 43 cents per pound of carbon not put into the atmosphere. This about the same cost yield as the “CLUNKERS” program. If you want to go further, install photovoltaic panels and eliminate your electric bill almost entirely. My wife and I installed a 7KW photovoltaic system on our home in May of this year and our current electric bills are $5.80 per month---the meter reading charge. We are currently 1200 kilowatt-hours ahead of the electric company after five months of operation and they will pay us 3.8 cents per kilowatt-hourat the end of the year. We have reduced our carbon footprint by 6,000 pounds per year using solar hot water heat and 24,000 pounds per year using our photovoltaic system. We have reduced it another 9,000 pounds per year by selecting a more fuel efficient auto. In total we have reduced our carbon footprint by about 39,000 pounds per year. I would like to be able to say that my electric vehicle, EV, (I converted a Ford Ranger to electric last year) has reduced my carbon footprint considerably, but when I charge it from the electric supplied by the utility, it has the same carbon footprint as it had before I converted it to electric. This is because of the way we generate electricity in Florida. When I charge it off my photo voltaic system, which I do about half the time, it has a zero carbon footprint. I only drive my EV about 4,000 miles per year. Because of the other vehicles that we own, and because of our indirect carbon footprint (transportation on our behalf and electricity use in the stores, businesses and restaurants that we frequent), our carbon footprint is still over 50,000 pounds per year. We are starting to run out of significant things that we can alter to reduce our carbon footprint, but the next time we need to buy a newer auto, it will have a higher gas mileage than our current one which gets 28 MPG. The photo voltaic system cost us approximately $50,000 which yields a cost per pound of carbon dioxide removed of about $2.08 per pound, considerably more expensive than the cost for solar hot water.
By the way, if everyone put a solar hot water heater on our roofs, we would not need to build a new power plant in Florida for the next 10 yrs and we would produce 27 billion pounds less carbon dioxide per year. The installation of these hot water heaters would cost about ¼ as much per kilowatt as a power plant. We would also not have to pay for larger distribution systems, because the power is produced where it is used (or in this case, not produced and used). If everyone put a 10 kilowatt photovoltaic system on their house, we would not need to build a new power plant for 50 years (I actually calculated 62 years, but my assumptions could be off a little). These photovoltaic systems would reduce our carbon footprint by 156 billion pounds per year. In Summary If we want to reduce our carbon footprint, we must look in the mirror and say “You are responsible for reducing carbon dioxide in this world”. There are lots of little things we can do, but to really make an impact, we must reduce the carbon from transportation and electricity. These two comprise 91% of our carbon footprint. The land cannot absorb or chelate the immense quantities of carbon dioxide that we generate, so we must generate less. Drilling more oil wells is not the answer, because this just introduces more carbon dioxide into the air. We must produce our power from non-carbon generating sources so that we will have the gasoline to power our more efficient autos. When you are done looking in the mirror and you have done all that you can afford to do, then start looking at our common facilities. Ask the restaurants to turn the air conditioning down, ask our elected officials to reduce their carbon footprint, on our behalf, ask our businesses to use more efficient transportation, etc. Demand that our power companies use one of the most abundant resources that we have--SUNSHINE. At present, we produce less than 0.5% percent of our power from solar. Adding up all of the solar projects currently under construction ups that power production in Florida by slightly more than 0.1% percent of the power that we use. This says that we have not done anything yet, and our current efforts in energy production from solar, although laudable, just are not significant. We should take our lead in this area from Iowa. Fifteen years ago, there was no measurable power generation from wind power in Iowa, but as of April of this year, Iowa produces 22% of its power requirements from wind generators (over 2,000 of them). Wind doesn’t work in Florida, because we do not have enough sustained wind, but we have a lot of sunshine.
Calculating YOUR carbon footprint Make up a side bar calculational sheet so all of the readers can calculate their own carbon footprint. Use the 4 categories that I have used above. Do the calculations for your family unit because all of the family shares the automobiles and electricity. Let N = number in your family. Respiration 800 times N =_____________________ Entertainment and food 2,000 times N =_____________________ Transportation Auto #1, _________miles per year at __________MPG =________________ Auto #2, __________miles per year at__________ MPG =________________ Vehicle #3_________miles per year at __________ MPG =________________ Air Travel _________miles per year at 40 MPG =_______________ Other travel (use your best guess, probably zero ) _______________ Indirect ( police, fire dept, trucking, etc ) 10,000 -------------------------
Electricity Direct effect Monthly bill _________ times 170 (or from Table 2)= ________________ Indirect effect ( your portion from restaurants, stores, etc ) Enter the same amount as you got from the direct effect = __________________ TOTAL CARBON FOOTPRINT (POUNDS PER YEAR) _____________________
Does your carbon footprint amaze you? The first time that I did this, I was amazed and somewhat awed. I always thought that I was a good environmentalist, but my carbon footprint was very high. What scares me is the thought that we required several more states the size of ours just to absorb or chelate our carbon dioxide. They do not exist because the rest of the world is following our lead and producing large quantities of carbon dioxide, so atmospheric carbon will continue to rise. My goal in writing this article is to make you aware of the magnitude of the problem and motivate some or all of you to do something to reduce your carbon footprint. I hope that I have been partially successful. For any group that is interested in learning more about my experiences with installation of solar hot water heat and photo voltaic systems, I have prepared a presentation and would be happy to present it at your meeting place. There is no charge. Contact me via my website.
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