Reducing my carbon footprint

By way of developing a New Year's resolution, I have been thinking about how I might reduce my carbon footprint by 25%. That's an arbitrary figure, below what is being said the world needs to accomplish in the near future, and high enough to be challenging and thought provoking. Broadly, there are a couple strategies: invest in conservation or change lifestyle.

Option #1, Invest. Buy a Prius and continue driving. The invest option either needs to produce a big impact in one area of my carbon footprint, or I need to invest in multiple areas of my life with modest gains in each. Since my family does considerable driving in town, we might do better to add Zap electric car at lower cost than a Prius.

Option #2, Lifestyle. Use 25% less of everything. Drive less, heat less, eat less. Or, substitute smaller footprint options (eat local food with less embodied carbon from transportation). Doing with less is cheaper and faster than investing, but may be harder to implement (or harder to keep implementing). Substituting might be more expensive (in time or money) but easier to choose. The problem is, finding enough substitutions to make the desired level of savings. Some substitutions (using a clothes line rather than a clothes dryer, walking vs driving) are going to take considerable change in how I organize my life and have impacts on (require consent of) how my family organizes its life.

Last summer's high gas prices and current talk of carbon taxes could make some of these choices clearer, and they also point out that the two types of strategies may be chosen differently by people of different economic means.

I looked at the payback on an electric car. If it replaced 5000 miles driven by a gas car getting 25 mpg and gas is $1.60, that is $320/year, not much of a payment on a loan. At $4/gallon its $800/year.

Resolutions
(Small) Investment. If big investment is out, because the payback is long and/or going into more debt seems imprudent right now, there is another option -- small investment. Small investment can feel to the psyche and wallet more like an operating expense (and payback time may be less important). An example in this category could be replacing incandescent light bulbs with CFLs even though the old bulbs are still good (Better yet would be to start into LED lights that promise to have lower power consumption per lumen.) Another example is to get a home energy audit and spend some time with a caulk gun.

Cut Back. I'm looking into putting a timer on my hot water tank. If it could be off 6 hrs/day, that should save something. Shorter showers, low flow shower heads are some other moves, but they require life style consent from others in the family. Changing lifestyle is probably better done slowly or it will likely feel like deprivation.

So, while I don't see making the 25% reduction this year, I'm making a New Years resolution to start some small investments and explore learning some new lifestyle habits.