Now it's getting hard - FY2011 Carbon Accounts

Our pollution figures for this year have increased a long way back towards their 2007 levels. Major contributors were my trip to Christchurch for a polo tournament and the purchase of a new laptop.
Looking ahead, we have decided to set a target of reaching the current¹ globally sustainable per capita emissions level (~1.2T CO2e) by 2050. This requires us to reduce by just over 3% each year, compounding. That will become increasingly challenging, and require systemic change² around us as well as personal lifestyle choices.

For the new year, we plan to find 2% by halving our regular butter and sugar consumption. These are mostly used for baking, for which we will increasingly use margarine. We are testing various recipes with less sugar, and may alter our selection of baked treats. As a side benefit, this could be healthier.³

We want to make the remaining 1% savings amongst our "irregular" consumption: rarely taken actions or supplies for special occassions. These are the source of all variation recorded between this year and last, as we haven't performed a new baseline audit and continue to use our 2010 figures. The very irregularity of this consumption makes it harder to work with. Over time we will expect continuing fluctuation, but require an underlying downward trend.

Accurately reporting this will require an improvement in our accounting practise. A likely first step will be to amortise the big figures, a practise we have so far applied only to the house. Our new laptop will be used over several years, but we thought there would be enough similar items from year to year to smooth out. That will be less and less the case as we make smarter purchases.⁴ We may also plan to fly domestically once every n years, rather than on a most-years basis, and budget that into our regular baseline.

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1) With world population expected to rise to perhaps 9 billion by 2050, the per capita sustainable emissions level will presumably decrease.
2) 20% of our current emissions are due to public services we have no direct choice about consuming. Yesterday Heather initiated conversation with a Dunedin city councillor on this very topic, building on a hint of shared interest.
3) Going significantly dairy free would make a much bigger impact on the carbon numbers, as well as distance us from an industry which has recently expanded beyond the country's carrying capacity. We remain held back by uncertainty over how to supply Heather's calcium needs and reluctance to overhaul the complex dietary system we have developed for her over eight years of illness.
4) The laptop also stands out because we bought it new, rather than second hand. We have chosen to assign all emissions responsibility to the initial (retail) purchaser, so the choice between new and second-hand is much more stark in carbon terms than dollar terms. We could change this policy, at least on large items, which would be more accurate in many ways but opens the thorny question of how to apply depreciation.

Goal vs Fear

Memo to the TV News people:

We do not fear that the ETS will drive up petrol prices: that was exactly the desired outcome. We may fear that the ETS as implemented won't drive them up enough, or that the government's ongoing rejig of taxation and benefits will fail to provide households with the capacity to pay a fair price for their basic needs, but not that this particular law change will work as intended.

Please return to your regularly scheduled programming.

Various GHG Emissions Graphs

With the scope of New Zealand's ETS expanding to cover petrol and electricity last Thursday (July 1st), there have been some protests organised by Federated Farmers and the ACT party. Leaving aside the irony of ACT standing against people paying for the resources they use, I want to look at how the way you present the statistics on carbon emissions may shape your response.

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When ACT says that "New Zealand's ETS will not make one iota of difference" they have presumably been looking at the leftmost of these two graphs from a public consultation on NZ's proposed emissions reduction target for 2020.
I'm not sure how an iota stacks up against 0.2%, but there is a point to be made that NZ going it alone won't solve the problem. Another point is clearly seen in the right hand graph--that NZ is above the median emissions level on a per-capita basis and has a moral responsibility to act.

If we can't go it alone, then the answer is not to pike and leave the problem for others (aka the global poor, who will die in their millions) but to show leadership. Rather than being so-called Fast Followers (aka laggards and shirkers) we should bend every effort to creating an international solution. I would be more sympathetic to those opposing the ETS if they showed willing to work for an alternative.

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Those countries who are willing to take action are deadlocked over who should do how much. Once again, different graphs give a different spin.

Let's start with this graphical analysis of proposed reduction targets for NZ, from the same set of documents as the previous graphs. I think it's quite cleverly compiled, presenting many different data points to show that the government is balancing competing domestic demands and taking a fast-follower position vis-a-vis other countries.


These percentage reduction figures seem to function as a proxy for the effort made by each country. Certainly the domestic conversation was predominantly about what level of reduction we could manage, and how hard other countries were(n't) trying. The level of effort can be emphasised by graphing projected emissions over time as well as proposed reduced rates, but such a graph runs the risk of making the problem look urgent as well as difficult.

Oxfam and Greenpeace tried to shift the discussion towards impact rather than effort. How much can we afford to emit? This question is better answered by the blue bars in the next chart, which takes the per-capita data from one of the first graphs and adds in a Goal value representing the long-term sustainable emissions level. Suddenly a 40% reduction for NZ seems less outlandish.

Another question arises once we see a long-term goal. How will any initial commitment develop? Will everybody close steadily on the Goal amount, or will their be an ongoing inequity? What is the equitable way to close to a common goal from such disparate starting points?

The red bars on this graph represent data that we rarely see: estimated emissions embedded in the provision of goods and services consumed within a country. These contrast strikingly with the emissions generated for the goods and services created in the country. This data is harder to measure, which I assume is why the Kyoto process isn't using it, but is significant in terms of where the dollars would end up if there were a global carbon price.

How do these numbers change the picture? Is it in our interest to negotiate an international deal based on the blue numbers, so long as we have a global market and our export customers cannot avoid paying us the difference between the red and blue bars? Should China be our ally, as their blue bar has outpaced their red throughout the decade since the figures shown above? Are the Americans even less likely to sign up to such a deal?

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I guess I should stop there for now and post this thing. Perhaps in the future I'll get back to other datasets, such as total emissions since 1850 by country per capita of current population or NZ's emissions with and without changing land use factors. (For the latter, look into the consultation paper referenced above and marvel at how the timing of a spike in forestry saves NZ's bacon for Kyoto then reverts us to being way behind for any future commitments!)

Household Carbon Calculator Posted

If you're interested in drilling down on which parts of your lifestyle are dependent on carbon emissions, then please check out the spreadsheet which Heather and I developed to audit our own consumption in 2008.

Feel free to send us more data for the table of emissions in various product categories. The tool could be a lot nicer, too, but after 18 months of futzing round with Google Spreadsheets, Zoho, and other random ideas, I've gone with a simple Excel spreadsheet. It does work in Open Office, too, so my conscience doesn't trouble me as much as it might.

We've also posted a few paragraphs on the intro page about why we support carbon pricing and why responsibility eventually rests with the consumer. I hope to develop a longer introduction to my thinking on carbon pricing for a friend and his kids, but a brief consultation with my blogging history indicates that you shouldn't hold your breath.

Our Carbon Emissions

Update - Jan 2010. The spreadsheet is finally available.

Heather has just worked out our carbon footprint for the last tax year, and found that we generate 3 times the sustainable global average. She has put a heap of effort in, based around 3 months of measuring and tabulating our household inputs and outputs. She has separated the routine elements from the irregular, and filled in for the rest of the year. We are both glad that we have completed our baseline measurements, and can take the compost out in peace.

The only changes we've made so far based on this info are switching from butter to margarine and putting up a 'No Advertising Please' sign on our letterbox. Recycling 3kg of junk mail a week generated about 6.5kg CO2 equivalent for each of us every week!

Here's the breakdown. Click through for the details - still working out how best to share this type of data. Eventually we plan to publish the detailed calculation spreadsheet in case anybody else would like to check their household out -- first I have to automate it further and port it all across to Google Docs.

Efficiency

Via Free Exchange I found yet another article considering the enormous challenge of meeting climate change stability targets. I agree with their opening point that efficiency will be the key issue, but I think that there is more than one facet to being efficient.

• Carbon-efficient power generation is all the article considers. This will be important, and we can probably make a lot of progress in that area. They focus on electricity generation, but we all know that efficient burning car engines etc will also matter.
• Efficient use of the generated power will also be important. Think car engines again, but also using other forms of transportation when a car's peculiar attributes are not required. Technology will move us forward here, but pricing (economically and/or socially) will help to make people aware of when they are choosing the inefficient option from the array of 'green' technology to hand.
• Unless the above work far better than expected, we're still going to have to make choices about what is really important to us. Expect pricing to feature again here, to help us determine what pursuits will efficiently achieve our key goals. Put differently, the up side of scarcity is clearer thinking about what we really want. So long as the scarcity is in luxuries this can be seen as good (if rather bracing). Unfortunately some of us will certainly retain the freedom to choose luxuries while others will be pushed to meet their most essential needs.

Heather and I are quite optimistic that a sustainable lifestyle can be devised which is truly enjoyable, but think it will require a shake-up that few are talking about at present. It could be quite healthy for us in the affluent 'West'/'North'.

p.s. We have just returned from a holiday weekend on Waiheke Island, where it proved really useful to have a car available for getting to/from the further-than-expected beach. On the other hand, as Dad and I paddled a rented kayak through the wake of various launches I pondered the ratio between the vastly greater resources required by a launch and the extra happiness it generated compared to our exertions.