A busy day! I went to lunch at Rotary with Twana. She gave a 30 minute presentation explaining the idea of a carbon footprint and how we are trying to cut ours in half in the next 3 years. The audience literally gasped when they saw how large a portion of our CO2 emissions come from air travel. Twana asked for a show of hands of members of the audience: had anyone ever calculated their carbon footprint? Not a single hand was raised.
Right after lunch I met with Don Giberson from SolarCity. He brought over the paperwork so we could finally order our solar system. There were lots of papers to sign -- about as many as when we bought our last new car. I signed everything and handed him the check for the downpayment. It feels good!
Showing posts with label Rotary. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Rotary. Show all posts
Tuesday, February 20, 2007
Sunday, February 18, 2007
Problems with Carbon Calculators
Twana and I were talking about our carbon footprint today. She couldn't believe it was as large as I said it was. I gave her the numbers I'd used in the Rotary presentation two weeks ago, and when she plugged them into the carbon calculator at The Climate Crisis web site, she got lower numbers than I had gotten from Acterra's calculator.
"OK," I thought, "this should be easy to settle. If two calculators are different, I should just be able to go to a third calculator and it would agree with one or the other of the first two."
No such luck! I spent a couple of hours checking out 7 different calculators, and there is far less consensus than there should be. I found at least two cases where there were discrepancies between the footnotes in "How we calculated the numbers" and the actual results that showed up on the screen. I'm very frustrated by this. If one of the goals of environmentalists is to cut CO2 production -- and it is -- we need to understand where to invest and how to change our behavior to do this effectively.
To give you an extreme example of how bad the discrepanices are, the Bonneville Education Foundation's calculator says that 10,000 kWh of electricity produced in California generates 3,264 pounds of CO2. But the Carboncounter.org's calculator says it produces 7,300 pounds.
The divergence for CO2 created by air travel was similarly large.
Grrr!
My conclusion is that Acterra's calculator is the best one that I was able to find, and it does a really good job of explaining how it comes up with the results it presents. So, I've included a link to it on the right-hand side of this blog.
"OK," I thought, "this should be easy to settle. If two calculators are different, I should just be able to go to a third calculator and it would agree with one or the other of the first two."
No such luck! I spent a couple of hours checking out 7 different calculators, and there is far less consensus than there should be. I found at least two cases where there were discrepancies between the footnotes in "How we calculated the numbers" and the actual results that showed up on the screen. I'm very frustrated by this. If one of the goals of environmentalists is to cut CO2 production -- and it is -- we need to understand where to invest and how to change our behavior to do this effectively.
To give you an extreme example of how bad the discrepanices are, the Bonneville Education Foundation's calculator says that 10,000 kWh of electricity produced in California generates 3,264 pounds of CO2. But the Carboncounter.org's calculator says it produces 7,300 pounds.
The divergence for CO2 created by air travel was similarly large.
Grrr!
My conclusion is that Acterra's calculator is the best one that I was able to find, and it does a really good job of explaining how it comes up with the results it presents. So, I've included a link to it on the right-hand side of this blog.
Tuesday, February 6, 2007
My Presentation to Mountain View Rotary
Twana has been in Rotary for a couple of years, and she set it up that I could speak about the Solar Buyers Group at their meeting today. I put together a short (7-slide) PowerPoint on very short notice.
There were about 25 Rotarians at the meeting, with an average age of 60+. I thought it would be a really tough audience, but not at all! One member, an architect named Dennis Kobza, told me that he has had a solar PV system on his home for 23 years!! Another member, Bert Raphael, has had solar (with battery back-up) at his Los Altos Hills home for a few years.
The presentation went really well, and the image from the final slide had a lot of impact. The photo was published last week in the New York Times. One Rotarian came up to me afterward and said "That picture was the whole presentation! It's all you needed to show." I've copied it below. The caption I used for it was: "Ask not 'What will it cost me to do this?' Ask, rather, 'What will it cost my grandchildren if I don't do this?' "
There were about 25 Rotarians at the meeting, with an average age of 60+. I thought it would be a really tough audience, but not at all! One member, an architect named Dennis Kobza, told me that he has had a solar PV system on his home for 23 years!! Another member, Bert Raphael, has had solar (with battery back-up) at his Los Altos Hills home for a few years.
The presentation went really well, and the image from the final slide had a lot of impact. The photo was published last week in the New York Times. One Rotarian came up to me afterward and said "That picture was the whole presentation! It's all you needed to show." I've copied it below. The caption I used for it was: "Ask not 'What will it cost me to do this?' Ask, rather, 'What will it cost my grandchildren if I don't do this?' "
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