How to actually reduce your carbon footprint - Postpone big outputs

We make decisions about big infrequent emissions all the time. Taking an overseas holiday, pouring a large concrete slab, buying a new car. A simple - even banal - way to reduce emissions in a given time period is to not emit in that time period. In other words, to postpone a project and thus the big emission associated with it.

In "How Bad Are Bananas" Mike Berners-Lee proposes a 10-tonne annual CO2 'budget' per person. I think this is a good starting point for a sustainable first-world lifestyle, but will probably not be enough in the end.

Here are some examples of postponed emissions.

• A new car is more or less a 1-tonne embedded carbon purchase. If you wait another year before you upgrade your car, you postpone the carbon emission to manufacture not your car, but the one that replaces your new car in the sales yard.
• An overseas trip (from Australia) is more or less a 1-ton per capita emission. How about you go camping a couple of hours drive out of the city this year, and schedule that trip to Europe for next year or the year after. You will postpone that emission. 
• A concrete slab is, conveniently enough for counting, about a ton of CO2 per room. Putting your new house extension on posts instead of a slab, or hunting around for low CO2 emissions concrete (hey check out the Roman technology here!)
  The rest of the new room is about a ton as well. How about you let the kids share a bedroom for another year, and postpone the whole renovation. Or the new kitchen. Or the landscaping & new swimming pool. Renovating in timber is not simple because it's a carbon cost and a carbon sink.
  But if there are manufactured surfaces (like plaster) or manufactured appliances, you can bet on at least 1 tonne. 
• Professionally, can you encourage your company to get another year out of that large appliance for your corporation (the big printer, the server rack, the factory air conditioner, the big industrial pump/machinery thingo)? Can you persist in the existing premises for just one more year without designing a new purpose-built thing in a concrete industrial park?
• Can you get the fleet cars to be used for 4 years instead of 3?
• Can you think of any other 1-tonne CO2 expenditures which can be postponed without much fuss? You might surprise yourself.

Simple, obvious, and astoundingly easy (inaction is often very easy). Plus, it may have unexpected benefits for your personal or organisational financial outgoings as well.

Global warming freak out

Last week, I had a global warming freak-out.

So being trained in statistics, I went to find a bigger sample of people. First I tried a straw poll of other parents at the school pickup waiting area revealed that most of them have had one too in the last 12 months too. Emily’s mum confessed to a nightmare about post-apocalyptic life in a bunker in a verdant Antarctica. James’s dad freaked out after reading an article about brown coal, and promptly called a solar company to get a quote on a rooftop PV array. On the spot, Emily’s mum asked James’s dad for the solar company’s number. Perhaps having young kids makes parents feel like we are not individuals, instead our kids are the tip of a genetic tendril stretching into the future. And in a +5°C world, we fear there’s not much of a future for them.

And then Sam’s Mum told us about her freak-out: that the smart meter recently installed on the outside of her bedroom wall was giving her brain cancer.

Then Lachie’s mum started talking about her sister’s anxiety about being tailgated by taxis.

All of a sudden, the conversation shifted into a very typical school pickup set of topics: rotating and apparently disconnected anecdotes about other peoples’ wacky anxieties and the equally wacky measures they employ to cope with them.

So the next day, I tried another experiment: I asked about global warming fears at the lunch table at work. I sat with about 10 men, all employed as infrastructure engineers, ranging in age from 22 to 60+ (I’m too polite to ask).

Once again, two people started to talk about their genuine freak-outs and subsequent sustainable/self-sufficient lifestyle measures, and then somebody shifted the pattern. This time, two programmers in their mid-30’s started joking about the potential threat to hops production and thus to the supply of BEER! Oh no save the BEER! they said, and led us onwards into stereotypical blokey alcohol and sport driven conversation.

On a data set of two, my working theory was this. Discussing global warming is like holding onto a wet eel - we can’t get a grip. Many people have a sense of unease, and will discuss fears and findings and scenarios one-to-one, but in a group there is always someone who will divert and unravel the conversation, and maybe the rest of us are all too happy to be released from thinking about it.

So I went looking for data point number three: A group of my old uni friends: several environmental science graduates now consulting to industries like mining or contaminated land, several doctors, a few engineers, a few biomedical scientists, a few others. All but two are parents of young kids. Once I told my freak-out story and opened the conversation, it was not derailed. They were all very sure that climate change is real, here now, and a big problem.  The enviro scientists kept producing stories about recent climate data, and how the models are surprisingly accurate. One of the doctors held our complete attention for 25 minutes talking on link between economic development, population health, and carbon output. We discussed drought and storms and the models for shifting weather patterns, food shortage, transport challenges, and the disproportionate political power of vested interests industries like mining and petrochemical energy. We shared what we knew about carbon capture and storage, energy generation and demand side management of fixed electricity loads, how cholera spreads after a natural disaster, and where our infrastructure and lifestyles are most vulnerable to gradual climate change, or larger more frequent catastropic weather events. Every one of us, in our professional life, had come across a reason to think very seriously about man-made climate change and what might be done, is being done, isn’t being done.

But in several hours of discussion we never touched on what all this might mean for our kids. It was just too scary, and too easy to give up hope.

In my view, the problem at the heart of the “climate debate” is this.

1. Climate scientists know that climate change is happening, due to human emissions of CO2. We know that the global climate system is a bit like a freight train: heavy and slow to start, but we’ve got the accelerator up full-bore, and just because we don’t know what the top line speed is or when it’s going to get there, we know that top line speed is
   a)    very bad for most life on this planet, and 
   b)   really very hard to slow down.
2. A small but increasing number of professionals are finding that their work touches on how climate change impacts on people. Actuaries calculating insurance risks need to take increased frequencies of ‘freak’ events. Botanists and zoologists are consistently discovering species shifting into new territories following climate change: Victorian alpine species are at risk from snow-less winters, and the ‘Cockroach Line’ has almost shifted from Canberra to as far south as Melbourne. A civil engineer spoke about how they’ve been redesigning our stormwater and sewerage systems for higher tides. and bigger floods from storms.
    
3. Psychologists have identified, and are starting to discuss, a new type of illness:
   Climate Anxiety.
   It’s particularly prevalent in certain demographics: late adolescents and young adults (whose brains, it turns out, are supremely adapted to thinking about ‘big picture’ issues like God and death and climate change); mothers of children under 5 (whose brains, it turns out, are triggered by pregnancy hormones to adapt to protecting their children and learning to manage daily life with the huge adjustment that the little one’s arrival entails); those with a history of anxiety issues (whose brains are flooded with anxiety neurotransmitters anyway!) and the very old (whose brains haven’t particularly been identified as changing, but whose thoughts are suddenly turning to God and death and the past that they’ve witnessed and the future of their bloodline and their loved ones).
4. Many of the rest of us don’t want to think about it. We just want to work, and get paid, and buy stuff hoping it will make us happy, and watch TV in the evenings so we don’t have to think. And we are the ones with jokes about beer, stories about taxis, thousands of ways of shutting down the conversation before that third tentative person can put their thoughts into words for the first time.

Here’s the thing. The freight train is getting faster. It’s about bloody time we start, and persist with, conversations about what to do next. Don't let others shut you down.

Why Old Suburbs are Nicer Than Housing Estates

The standard complaints with the growth of the outer suburbs are well known. Insufficient infrastructure, long commute times without appropriate public transport options built alongside the developments, destruction of the city's green wedges, profligate developers squeezing too many houses which are too big on blocks which are too small; roasting hot concrete in summer and bleak treeless wasteland in winter.

Here is another perspective: what is absent, instead of what is present.
You will never find any of the following things in a new suburb - not for decades.

1) Pear trees

They take 50 years to grow like this, and they are gorgeous, and their trunks are gnarled and dark, and they don't transplant very well. If you want a pear tree, you need to find a house with an established pear tree. Don't buy a new house and land package.

2) Cicadas

These little guys mark the beginning of summer. They are so exciting for kids to find, the shells typically appear before Christmas and make awesome tree decorations, and on hot days they sing so loud that you can't hear yourself think. They live underground for years (different species use a different prime number of years between their metamorphosis, so they each get a decent food supply without getting in each others' faces). This year, we had a bunch of tiny red-and-green ones, 3-5cm long, emerging from under the wood pile. We excavated there in 1994. I was excited because they are the first from the dug-up area. The childcare centre had the big green fellas leaving their shells up and down the fence. The kids were stoked. The centre was constructed in about 1988. But all those good folk out in new suburbs will not see or hear cicadas for decades.

3) Native orchids

 Tiny little treasures like this one hide in the grassland down at the creek. The real estate agent tried to sell off the 80Ha block for development. I am glad nobody bought it and they took it off the market. I like the orchids.

4) Wild mushrooms
WE LOVE mushrooming season. In Autumn, we walk out the front door with a basket and come back with a basket like this.

We don't pick these ones. They can make you throw up until you die of dehydration.

5) Birds nesting in hollow trees
Manky hideous tumbledown gumtree, right?

Nope. Luxurious penthouse apartment for a tawny frogmouth. Or a five-generation chateau for a family of lorikeets or rosellas. Birdlife in new suburbs sucks because they don't have the habitat. Leave your hollow trees up for as long as you can tolerate - and enjoy the sight & song of all those wild birds.

6) Samoan treeloppers

 Because when the adjacent suburbs have been recently built on clear-felled land, and your garden is full of hollow trees, cutting them down seems like a good plan. And then these good folk come through in winter/spring looking for work door-to-door, and they are very good indeed. In Winter you don't think much about the native birds or the shade that the tree imparts. Just the drippy messy leaves and gumnuts. And it seems like a good plan. So they cut your trees, and your neighbours', and three doors down, and so on,
They don't even bother showing up to suburbs less than 20 years old. The trees just aren't worth their time.

7) Shopping centre carparks with shade

See that tree on the right? There are four good carpark spots in the shade of that tree. And twenty trees just like it out the back of the fruit shop near the scout hall. I parked there the other day in 35 degrees and went to the post office and my car was gorgeous and cool. There ain't nothin' like that in the new suburbs. I love that tree.