Going Carbon Neutral

Just this last December there were house parties organized all across the country by MoveOn.org, the Sierra Club and other environmental groups to show the movie "An Inconvenient Truth". After the movie there was a conference call with Al Gore and this one question stood out amongst all the other questions: "What is the one most important action I can take as an individual to help curb climate change"? Al Gore: "To become carbon neutral".

Great, what is that? To become carbon neutral is to make sure that during your daily activities and actions, you do not add any additional CO2 to the atmosphere. So how do you do that?

Measure Your Carbon Footprint

The first step is to find out what your CO2 emissions are. It is very difficult to reduce or change something you don’t even know how to measure. To do this you will need to use a CO2 calculator. You will need to gather some information first: your utility bills, car mileage and MPG, and air travel miles for the last year. There are several CO2 calculators on the web. We recommend the Cool-It Carbon Calculator developed by Acterra and the local chapter of the Sierra Club as part of the Cool-It campaign that they are promoting. This calculator helps you identify the total amount of CO2 you produce in one year.

Great, now what? The Cool-It web sites list suggestions for reducing your energy use (CO2 emissions). You will find that many of these suggestions are the same as the Peninsula Cool Monthly Challenges.

Renewable Energy Credits, a.k.a. "Green Tags"

Since you can't get to zero CO2 emissions, Cool-It, offers the ability to purchase Renewable Energy Credits (RECs) to mitigate your remaining CO2 emissions. RECs, often called green tags, are the environmental benefit that is generated when renewable energy is generated. In essence, it is the amount of CO2 saved (not generated) with the production of renewable electricity as compared to the CO2 generated by a coal fired power plant. So if you purchase RECs equal to your CO2 emissions, this will balance out your CO2 emissions.

In many cases reducing your energy use will reduce your utility bill enough to pay for RECs equal to your energy use and you will still be saving money. So going carbon neutral can also be "dollar" neutral as well. If you live in Palo Alto, please sign up for the Palo Alto Green program to get "green" renewable energy from wind through the Palo Alto Utilities web site. This will offset all of your electricity usage. That way you will pay less for RECs for your remaining CO2 emissions.

Is it Really That Easy?

So this sounds great! Pay a little bit and global warming is solved. Not so fast. CO2 levels are 36% higher then 150 years ago and climbing. Even if we cut our CO2 emissions by 70% of today’s rates, we will be lucky to cap the CO2 levels to twice what it was before we started burning fossil fuels. CO2 in the atmosphere stays around for more than 100 years so even if we stopped all emissions now, things would still heat up and get worse.

The Long Term Solution

The real solution is to move towards livable-walkable communities (less cars) that are based on local resources and run on renewable energy. So far our urban sprawl and car dependent, fossil fuel dependent, WalMart infused society has been just the opposite of what we need. Livable-walkable communities move us towards a higher quality of life. Look at Europe, they get by with half the energy we do in the U.S. and most people would say they do not have half the quality of life, quite the contrary. If we had been evolving towards these more livable communities based on renewable energy, global warming would not be an issue and we would be much happier overall.

But we are not there and we have lots of work to do in a short amount of time if we are to avoid what most scientist believe will be world that is very different from the one we live in now. So if you would like to lessen the disaster that await your kids, take the monthly challenges to heart and do what you can and consider purchasing RECs to offset your CO2 emissions that you can’t eliminate. Then work on a better way to live. Try to get your work and home/school closer to each other. When you need a new car, or appliance, get the most efficient ones you can. Purchase renewable power if you can. Speak up at city council meeting when these livable-walkable (smart growth) projects come up and support them. Shop locally, who knows, maybe you will see your neighbors at the local Farmer’s market and you can ride your bikes home together.

Bikes Are The Way To Go

Bikepools to School, Cool! In 7th and 8th grades I started to ride my bike to Peninsula School from Portola Valley. Sometimes my bother and I would meet a classmate from Los Trancos or Ladera on our way to school. I remember one sleep over was riding my bike to school and then to a friend’s house in Sunnyvale and then back the next morning to school. The early days of biking served me well and I am still on my bike today whenever I can.

David Coale

class of '70