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June 1, 2014

Wind, Windmills, Carbon Sequestration

Posted by Nathen under carbon sequestration, desert living, landfill, solar energy, wind, windmills, wood
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I hate wind. It’s a natural and deep hate that comes with growing up in the desert. So many swim practices on sunny days rendered freezing, so many treasured but aerodynamic objects disappeared to the next county, so many teenage hairstyles ruined. Wind is the Voldemort of Joshua Tree, the weather-that-shall-not-be-named: “Hey, have you noticed we haven’t had much doubleyou eye en-dee lately? Gotta love it!”

So since I’ve moved back to the desert, I’ve been thinking about what I could do to change my relationship with wind. I’d so much rather be happy than depressed when it blows, but it’s been a tough one. There’s just not much to like. I could get into kites, I guess, but I don’t feel excited about that idea. Desert kiteboarding (boarding starts at 1:00) looks like it could be fun but I’d need to get into much better shape. I’ll have to wait for my sprained wrist to heal, at least.

The obvious answer is energy-generating windmills, and I got excited about them for a while, but really we don’t need more electricity here. Thanks to a great investment by my dad, we have solar panels that generate about as much electricity as we can use.

The last idea I got excited about was a kind of wind-based CO2 scrubber. I imagined a funnel that directed air over a scrubber of some kind that was powered by an attached windmill. The scrubber would poop carbon dust (or bricks, even better) that I could bury somewhere on my property. Or whatever the hippest thing to do with carbon dust is–I never got that far. Genius, I thought. I could be happy about wind that was doing some small part to undo my pollution.

I never got that far because there are only prototypes of machines kind of like it at this point, and it is apparently not clear how well they will work. As I understand it, scrubbing CO2 out of air is difficult to do because there is so little CO2 in air. It’s much easier to do where the pollution is thick, like industrial smoke stacks. The takeaway from my several hours of looking into it was that it was probably more ethical to use whatever extra money I could scrape together to buy and install more solar panels to connect to the grid.  Not as satisfying as sucking my own pollution out of the air, but donating clean energy to power other people’s lives could mean less pollution produced in the first place.

Thinking about carbon sequestration shifted my thinking a bit in an unexpected direction. The millions and millions of stick frame houses in the US are made of sequestered carbon, for example. And landfills: All the junk mail and cardboard boxes in landfills are made of sequestered carbon.  All the plastic crap in landfills is made of sequestered carbon. I still think that forest conservation, sustainable forest management, and reforestation are some of the very most important things we can do, but I no longer cringe as much when I see forest products heading for landfills, stick frame houses in deserts, or wood siding when it should have been plaster. Even all that tragic plastic crap–at least we’re not burning it.

 

 

June 15, 2012

A Quick Foray Into Carbon Footprint Calculation: 10.41 Metric Tons of CO2

Posted by Nathen under air travel, Americans, buying local, carbon footprint, cars, climate change, driving, ethics, food, gas mileage, global warming, landfill, travel | Tags: |
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On a challenge from the blog 400 Days ’til 40 I did a quick-and-dirty calculation of our carbon footprint for a year here in California. I just used the top hit on Google for “carbon footprint calculator” and made my best estimates for all the values they asked for:

1. I live in California, USA, in a household of two.

2. I use no natural gas, heating oil, coal, LPG, and no net electricity by virtue of a solar array, thanks to an investment by my father. Reanna and I cook with propane, and a little research is leading me to believe we will go through approximately 50 gallons in a year, maybe less. Our share of the firewood that my parents burn for heat in the evenings is about .4 of a cord. My share of all this contributes .08 metric tons of CO2 per year.

3. I fly to Portland and to Albany every year to work at Not Back to School Camp. That contributes .95 metric tons of CO2. Something like a quarter of a ton for each leg. Pricey!

4. Car travel is the biggest polluter at 5.05 metric tons of CO2. This amount probably varies quite a bit each year and is way up from my Eugene, OR lifestyle. This estimate includes a few trips to town each week, a dozen trips to the LA area, and one long road trip to Canada. That’s a bit less than 2 tons for each of those kinds of commutes.

5. I use a significant amount of bus and train travel on my business (and some other) trips as well, adding about .12 metric tons of CO2.

6. The second biggest polluter is a group of “lifestyle” choices. 1.21 tons for eating animal products, 1 ton for owning one car, .5 tons for eating only “mostly” local produce, .61 tons for buying stuff with packaging, .17 tons for buying “some” new equipment, .41 for throwing some stuff away, 1 ton for sometimes going out to movies and restaurants, and .4 tons for having a bank account. Total = 4.21 metric tons of CO2. (The highest value possible here was 24.53 tons.)

Here is the summary they gave me:

  • Your footprint is 10.41 metric tons per year
  • The average footprint for people in United States is 20.40 metric tons
  • The average for the industrial nations is about 11 metric tons
  • The average worldwide carbon footprint is about 4 metric tons
  • The worldwide target to combat climate change is 2 metric tons

I have plenty of questions about and criticisms of the way this calculator works. They ask my household size first but do not indicate if they are calculating my individual footprint or my household’s. That could change my score quite a bit if I’m taking the blame for Reanna’s share.

I’d like find a calculator which takes into account more specifics, too. I have owned the same car for 20 years, for example, but the way they asked the question gave me the same carbon footprint as someone who has a brand new SUV every year. Miles driven, too, is not as important as number of gallons of gasoline burned (see my mileage/fuel tracking project here). I buy some things with packaging and I throw some stuff in the landfill (see my landfill tracking project here), but “some” is a vague category to hang such a precise 1.02 metric tons of carbon on! What about grass-fed versus industrially produced meat?

On the other hand, two metric tons is a pretty tight carbon budget, and finding a more accurate calculator will not likely shift my score dramatically. And with this calculator, I am at 520% of my two metric tons, this with a relatively low-profile lifestyle for an American. I could come down to 222% if I did not own a car and never drove one. If I also stopped eating animal products and stopped going to movies and restaurants, I would be close, at 112%. If I also stopped flying, I could actually come in under budget, at 64%, leaving some slack for others.

That’s a pretty discouraging proposition! The biggest barrier is the isolation. No travel means never seeing a large part of my family and community. And the idea is that kinds of lifestyle choices would have to become the norm, not just the domain of eccentrics….

I’m going to have to do some more thinking about this.

 

January 22, 2010

Landfill 2009 Project Complete

Posted by Nathen under Americans, Canadians, composting, landfill, projects, recycling
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I documented all of my landfill contribution for the year 2009. There is a little write-up of the project and photos of all my trash on my Landfill page.  The short version of the story is that I generated 57 pounds of non-recyclable, non-compostable garbage in 2009. That’s a lot more than I had anticipated, and when I look at the photos I get embarrassed. Very little, if any, of that trash was necessary. Still, it’s a bit better than the average American’s four pounds per day, according to the Clean Air Council’s page on American waste. How do people do that? I’m not sure I could keep up that pace if I was getting paid to. That’s 1,460 pounds per person per year. Canadians are whupping us here, by a lot. All of the estimates I came across for Canadian landfill per person per year were less than half of that. Even in Alberta.