Author: Karl Coplan

No, I don’t mean I am going to divest by selling all my shares of ExxonMobil stock.

If we really want to get fossil fuel companies to “leave it in the ground,” the only way we are going to do that is by stopping buying and burning the stuff, not by selling their stock to someone else who will just get a slightly higher return on our fossil fuel habit.

For the past few years my Earth Week observance has included giving up all direct use of fossil fuels — anything I have a choice about.  So, for the next week, no gasoline or diesel powered transport (not even the bus), no natural gas appliances, no buying any fossil fuel generated electricity. Since I have a renewable energy contract for my electricity, there is no problem keeping the lights on, using the electric hot water kettle, and charging my electric car and motorcycle.

The first problem is to figure out when Earth Week starts.  Earth Day is this Friday, the 22nd.  But there doesn’t seem to be any official start or finish to Earth Week.  Based on a google search for Earth Week 2016, the consensus of college campuses seems to be that Earth Week starts either today or tomorrow.  Since it’s never too soon to go fossil free, I am today to be the first day of Earth Week 2016.

After declaring the start to earth Week, I had a discussion with my spouse about shutting off the natural gas and how it would be a good idea to take a hot shower right away with the water that was already in the water tank before it cooled down too much.  My spouse, Robin, is wonderfully supportive.  Actually, I think she managed to be traveling during all of my previous fossil free Earth Weeks.

So I got up, shut off the gas to the water heater, took a hot shower, made a waffle breakfast that couldn’t be beat and set off to enjoy a fine and fossil free April day. Project number one: slap a couple more solar panels on the side of the house . . .

Being on a carbon budget is sort of like being on a diet.  You have to count pounds of carbon just like you count calories on a diet.  The big ticket carbon items in my life are the gasoline I burn when I get in a car or on a bus, and the natural gas I burn for cooking and heating in my house.  I count my electricity as carbon free, since I have a 100% renewable energy contract with my utility.  I put together a spreadsheet to keep track of my carbon emitting activities — I even included a line for eating beef.   A pound of beef is 28 pounds of CO2 — more than a gallon of gasoline!

Environmentally minded Americans recognize that global climate change is the single most urgent ecological and political issue facing the planet.  If you are like me, you want to live consistently with your beliefs about climate change. We all know we need to reduce our carbon impacts. But we don’t know by how much, and most environmental organizations don’t give us a clue what a sustainable carbon footprint would look like.  The rate of global carbon emissions overwhelms us, and makes individual action feel futile.  Giving up carbon emissions entirely seems inconsistent with a contemporary, comfortable lifestyle in the developed world.

But most people share the basic ethical sense that it is wrong to make lifestyle choices that cause harm to other people.  And we know that climate change will cause grievous harm to millions of people around the globe.  It’s easy to blame capitalism and large, impersonal oil and coal companies for climate change, but we can’t ignore our own complicity in the fossil fuel economy when we burn gas to get to work, jet fuel to go on vacation, natural gas to heat and cook, and coal generated electricity to light and cool our houses.  As cartoonist Walt Kelly put it forty years ago, “We have met the enemy, and he is us!”

This is a blog about living a good life with a sustainable individual carbon footprint of about four tons CO2 equivalent per year. The dual, mildly contradictory premises of this blog are that 1) we all share an ethical responsibility to live right now with a carbon footprint that will not cause catastrophic climate impacts to other people, and 2) life should be fun.

I think that an individual direct footprint of four tons per year is defensible as sustainable for a middle class citizen of a developed nation during the phaseout of all fossil fuels over the next few decades.  Some might argue that this is unjustifiably high (it is much higher than a per capita global allocation of the remaining carbon emissions budget), some might argue that it is impossibly low (few people in the US get by on a four ton carbon budget).  I will explain this in greater detail elsewhere.

 

I plan to use this blog to share my thoughts about the meaning of carbon sustainability, and to share my experiences with lowering my footprint for getting to work and heating and lighting my house, while saving some of my carbon budget for fun!