Thread: What is *YOUR* Effect on "Global Warming" ? Carbon footprint calculator ...

The carbon calculator provides a simple guide to your household carbon footprint based upon key features of your home, your personal energy use profile, your use of green technologies and your transport profile.

A household carbon footprint is the quantity of CO2 emitted to the atmosphere as a result of household energy use, transportation and waste disposal in one year.

This version of the carbon calculator is based on evidence from household energy studies in Australia, Canada, China, France, Germany, Hong Kong, Netherlands, United Kingdom, United States, Singapore, and South Africa. It enables you to explore how changes to your home, the way you use energy and your transport choices can affect CO2 emissions.

Because the calculator does not ask you for specific data on how much fuel or electricity you consume, it is easy to use but is only intended as an approximate guide.

To use the calculator complete the questions within each of the four sections. As you select options within the calculator, the resulting CO2 emissions are displayed above.


Carbon footprint calculator http://www.bp.com/extendedsectiongen...ace=1604280000

Non flash calculator http://www.bp.com/carboncalculator.d...tentId=7025802

*results are measured in tonnes of CO2.
How much is a tonne of CO2?

1 tonne of CO2 emissions occupies 556 m3 of space at 25 degrees Celsius and standard pressure. The volume of water in an Olympic swimming pool is approximately 2500m3. Therefore the average household CO2 emissions in the UK (approximately 10 tonnes per year) would be enough to fill about two Olympic swimming pools and the average household emissions in the USA (approximately 20 tonnes per year) would be enough to fill about four and half Olympic swimming pools!

My Footprint is 14.00
National Average is 18.00

My footprint is 9 tonnes per year,compared to the national average of 18.58.

Mine was 6 tonnes.

The Year Without Toilet Paper
By PENELOPE GREEN
Published: March 22, 2007

DINNER was the usual affair on Thursday night in Apartment 9F in an elegant prewar on Lower Fifth Avenue. There was shredded cabbage with fruit-scrap vinegar; mashed parsnips and yellow carrots with local butter and fresh thyme; a terrific frittata; then homemade yogurt with honey and thyme tea, eaten under the greenish flickering light cast by two beeswax candles and a fluorescent bulb.

A sour odor hovered oh-so-slightly in the air, the faint tang, not wholly unpleasant, that is the mark of the home composter. Isabella Beavan, age 2, staggered around the neo-Modern furniture — the Eames chairs, the brown velvet couch, the Lucite lamps and the steel cafe table upon which dinner was set — her silhouette greatly amplified by her organic cotton diapers in their enormous boiled-wool, snap-front cover.

A visitor avoided the bathroom because she knew she would find no toilet paper there.

Meanwhile, Joseph, the liveried elevator man who works nights in the building, drove his wood-paneled, 1920s-era vehicle up and down its chute, unconcerned that the couple in 9F had not used his services in four months. “I’ve noticed,” Joseph said later with a shrug and no further comment. (He declined to give his last name. “I’ve got enough problems,” he said.)

Welcome to Walden Pond, Fifth Avenue style. Isabella’s parents, Colin Beavan, 43, a writer of historical nonfiction, and Michelle Conlin, 39, a senior writer at Business Week, are four months into a yearlong lifestyle experiment they call No Impact. Its rules are evolving, as Mr. Beavan will tell you, but to date include eating only food (organically) grown within a 250-mile radius of Manhattan; (mostly) no shopping for anything except said food; producing no trash (except compost, see above); using no paper; and, most intriguingly, using no carbon-fueled transportation.

Mr. Beavan, who has written one book about the origins of forensic detective work and another about D-Day, said he was ready for a new subject, hoping to tread more lightly on the planet and maybe be an inspiration to others in the process.

Also, he needed a new book project and the No Impact year was the only one of four possibilities his agent thought would sell. This being 2007, Mr. Beavan is showcasing No Impact in a blog (http://www.noimpactman.com) laced with links and testimonials from New Environmentalist authorities like treehugger.com. His agent did indeed secure him a book deal, with Farrar, Straus & Giroux, and he and his family are being tailed by Laura Gabbert, a documentary filmmaker and Ms. Conlin’s best friend.

Why there may be a public appetite for the Conlin-Beavan family doings has a lot to do with the very personal, very urban face of environmentalism these days. Thoreau left home for the woods to make his point (and secure his own book deal); Mr. Beavan and Ms. Conlin and others like them aren’t budging from their bricks-and-mortar, haut-bourgeois nests.

Mr. Beavan looks to groups like the Compacters (sfcompact.blogspot.com), a collection of nonshoppers that began in San Francisco, and the 100 Mile Diet folks (100milediet.org and thetyee.ca), a Vancouver couple who spent a year eating from within 100 miles of their apartment, for tips and inspiration. But there are hundreds of other light-footed, young abstainers with a diarist urge: it is not news that this shopping-averse, carbon-footprint-reducing, city-dwelling generation likes to blog (the paperless, public diary form). They have seen “An Inconvenient Truth”; they would like to tell you how it makes them feel. If Al Gore is their Rachel Carson, blogalogs like Treehugger, grist.org and worldchanging.com are their Whole Earth catalogs.

Andrew Kirk, an environmental history professor at the University of Nevada, Las Vegas, whose new book, “Counterculture Green: The Whole Earth Catalog and American Environmentalism,” will be published by University Press of Kansas in September, is reminded of environmentalism’s last big bubble, in the 1970s, long before Ronald Reagan pulled federal funding for alternative fuel technologies (and his speechwriters made fun of the spotted owl and its liberal protectors, a deft feat of propaganda that set the movement back decades). Those were the days when Stewart Brand and his Whole Earth writers, Mr. Kirk said, “focused on a brand of environmentalism that kept people in the picture.”

“That’s the thing about this current wave of environmentalism,” he continued. “It’s not about, how do we protect some abstract pristine space? It’s what can real people do in their home or office or whatever. It’s also very urban. It’s a critical twist in the old wilderness adage: Leave only footprints, take only photographs. But how do you translate that into Manhattan?”

With equals parts grace and calamity, it appears. Washed down with a big draught of engaging palaver.

Before No Impact — this is a phrase that comes up a lot — Ms. Conlin and Mr. Beavan were living a near parody of urban professional life. Ms. Conlin, who bought this apartment in 1999 when she was still single, used the stove so infrequently (as in, never, she said) that Con Edison called to find out if it was broken. (Mr. Beavan, now the family cook, questioned whether she had yet to turn it on. Ms. Conlin ignored him.)

In this household, food was something you dialed for. “We would wake up and call ‘the man,’ ” Ms. Conlin said, “and he would bring us two newspapers and coffee in Styrofoam cups. Sometimes we’d call two men, and get bagels from Bagel Bob’s. For lunch I’d find myself at Wendy’s, with a Dunkin’ Donuts chaser. Isabella would point to guys on bikes and cry: ‘The man! The man!’ ”

Since November, Mr. Beavan and Isabella have been hewing closely, most particularly in a dietary way, to a 19th-century life. Mr. Beavan has a single-edge razor he has learned to use (it was a gift from his father). He has also learned to cook quite tastily from a limited regional menu — right now that means lots of apples and root vegetables, stored in the unplugged freezer — hashing out compromises. Spices are out but salt is exempt, Mr. Beavan said, because homemade bread “is awful without salt; salt stops the yeast action.” Mr. Beavan is baking his own, with wheat grown locally and a sour dough “mother” fermenting stinkily in his cupboard. He is also finding good sources at the nearby Union Square Greenmarket (like Ronnybrook Farm Dairy, which sells milk in reusable glass bottles). The 250-mile rule, by the way, reflects the longest distance a farmer can drive in and out of the city in one day, Mr. Beavan said.

Olive oil and vinegar are out; they used the last dregs of their bottle of balsamic vinegar last week, Mr. Beavan said, producing a moment of stunned silence while a visitor thought about life without those staples. Still, Mr. Beavan’s homemade fruit-scrap vinegar has a satisfying bite.

The television, a flat-screen, high-definition 46-incher, is long gone. Saturday night charades are in. Mr. Beavan likes to talk about social glue — community building — as a natural byproduct of No Impact. The (fluorescent) lights are still on, and so is the stove. Mr. Beavan, who has a Ph.D. in applied physics, has not yet figured out a carbon-fuel-free power alternative that will run up here on the ninth floor, though he does subscribe to Con Ed’s Green Power program, for which he pays a premium, and which adds a measure of wind and hydro power to the old coal and nuclear grid.

The dishwasher is off, along with the microwave, the coffee machine and the food processor. Planes, trains, automobiles and that elevator are out, but the family is still doing laundry in the washing machines in the basement of the building. (Consider the ramifications of no-elevator living in a vertical city: one day recently, when Frankie the dog had digestive problems, Mr. Beavan, who takes Isabella to day care — six flights of stairs in a building six blocks away — and writes at the Writers Room on Astor Place — 12 flights of stairs, also six blocks away — estimated that by nightfall he had climbed 115 flights of stairs.) And they have not had the heart to take away the vacuum from their cleaning lady, who comes weekly (this week they took away her paper towels).

Until three weeks ago, however, Ms. Conlin was following her “high-fructose corn syrup ways,” meaning double espressos and pastries administered daily. “Giving up the coffee was like crashing down from a crystal meth addiction,” she said. “I had to leave work and go to bed for 24 hours.”

Toothpaste is baking soda (a box makes trash, to be sure, but of a better quality than a metal tube), but Ms. Conlin is still wearing the lipstick she gets from a friend who works at Lancôme, as well as moisturizers from Fresh and Kiehl’s. When the bottles, tubes and jars are empty, Mr. Beavan has promised her homemade, rules-appropriate substitutes. (Nothing is a substitute for toilet paper, by the way; think of bowls of water and lots of air drying.)

Yet since the beginning of No Impact, and to the amusement of her colleagues at Business Week, Ms. Conlin has been scootering to her office on 49th Street each day, bringing a Mason jar filled with greenhouse greens, cheese and her husband’s bread for lunch, along with her own napkin and cutlery. She has taken a bit of ribbing: “All progress is carbon fueled,” jeered one office mate.

Ms. Conlin, acknowledging that she sees her husband as No Impact Man and herself as simply inside his experiment, said she saw “An Inconvenient Truth” in an air-conditioned movie theater last summer. “It was like, ‘J’accuse!’ ” she said. “I just felt like everything I did in my life was contributing to a system that was really problematic.” Borrowing a phrase from her husband, she continued, “If I was a student, I would march against myself.”

While Ms. Conlin is clearly more than just a good sport — giving up toilet paper seems a fairly profound gesture of commitment — she did describe, in loving detail, a serious shopping binge that predated No Impact and made the whole thing doable, she said. “It was my last hurrah,” she explained.

It included two pairs of calf-high Chloe boots (one of which was paid for, she said, with her mother’s bingo winnings) and added up to two weeks’ salary, after taxes and her 401(k) contribution.

The bingo windfall points to a loophole in No Impact: the Conlin-Beavan household does accept presents. When Mr. Beavan’s father saw Ms. Conlin scootering without gloves he sent her a pair. And allowances can be made for the occasional thrift shop purchase. For Isabella’s birthday on Feb. 25, her family wandered the East Village and ended up at Jane’s Exchange, where she chose a pair of ballet slippers as her gift.

“They cost a dollar,” Ms. Conlin said.

It was freezing cold that day, Mr. Beavan said, picking up the story. “We went into a restaurant to warm her up. We agonized about taking a cab, which we ended up not doing. I still felt like we really screwed up, though, because we ate at the restaurant.”

He said he called the 100 Mile Diet couple to confess his sin. They admitted they had cheated too, with a restaurant date, then told him, Yoda-like, “Only in strictness comes the conversion.”

Restaurants, which are mostly out in No Impact, present all sorts of challenges beyond the 250-mile food rule. “They always want to give Isabella the paper cup with the straw, and we have to send it back,” Mr. Beavan said. “We always say, ‘We’re trying not to make any trash.’ And some people get really into that and others clearly think we’re big losers.”

Living abstemiously on Lower Fifth Avenue, in what used to be Edith Wharton country, with early-21st-century accouterments like creamy, calf-high Chloe boots, may seem at best like a scene from an old-fashioned situation comedy and, at worst, an ethically murky exercise in self-promotion. On the other hand, consider this response to Mr. Beavan’s Internet post the day he and his family gave up toilet paper.

“What’s with the public display of nonimpactness?” a reader named Bruce wrote on March 7. “Getting people to read a blog on their 50-watt L.C.D. monitors and buy a bound volume of postconsumer paper and show the filmed doc in a heated/air-conditioned movie theater, etc., sounds like nonimpact man is leading to a lot of impact. And how are you going to measure your nonimpact, except in rather self-centered ways like weight loss and better sex? (Wait, maybe I should stop there.)”

Indeed. Concrete benefits are already accruing to Ms. Conlin and Mr. Beavan that may tempt others. The sea may be rising, but Ms. Conlin has lost 4 pounds and Mr. Beavan 20. It took Ms. Conlin over an hour to get home from work during the snowstorm on Friday, riding her scooter, then walking in her knee-high Wellingtons with her scooter on her back, but she claimed to be mostly exhilarated by the experience. “Rain is worse,” she said.

Perhaps the real guinea pig in this experiment is the Conlin-Beavan marriage.

“Like all writers, I’m a megalomaniac,” Mr. Beavan said cheerfully the other day. “I’m just trying to put that energy to good use.”

http://www.nytimes.com/2007/03/22/ga...0A&oref=slogin

Originally Posted by Jolie Rouge

The Year Without Toilet Paper
By PENELOPE GREEN
Published: March 22, 2007

So, they refuse to wipe their two-year-old's bottom and have sworn off paper to save the trees.

But Daddy will kill how many of those trees selling books bragging about their impact-less lifestyles? (Beavan promises: "...the book will come out some time in 2009 (assuming the world, me and FSG all still exist). It will be printed and produced in some, yet to be determined, sustainable way.") Uh-huh.

Like Al Gore, these people are beyond parody.

***

From the "No Impact Man's" question-and-answer page, I kid you not:

Can your wife use tampons?
Let’s just say this. Disposable culture is a big problem. We’re moving away from it. And I promised Michelle I would not discuss this for now. She has to be allowed to draw a line somewhere (at least that’s what our couples’ therapist says—joking). Anyway, for more on the tampon topic, read the comments in this post.


Have you considered the climate/waste/energy input associated with eating diary?

Please don’t try to make us give up our milk and cheese and homemade yogurt. I’m begging you. Since we’re eating only unpackaged local and seasonal food, that would pretty much leave us with nothing but apples a la cabbage and cabbage a la apples. Besides, we buy our milk from the local Ronnybrook Farms, where the cows are fed grass and homegrown corn.

How do you make fruit scrap vinegar?

Great book: Wild Fermentation by Sandor Ellix Katz. Get your scraps of fruit—apple cores, dregs of berries (though no berries for us cause they’re not in season), whatever—and chop up coarsely. Dissolve a quarter cup of honey (recipe calls for sugar but I can’t get it locally) in one quart water. Throw the scraps in and cover with a cloth. Let ferment for two or three weeks, stirring occasionally. Adds great flavor to—you guessed it—cabbage.

But what about after peeing, do you still wash? Isn’t that a waste of water?

To the tune of Oh Christmas Tree: Oh polar bears, oh polar bears, I bared my bathroom habits just for you… I bet you can figure out a solution. You don’t need me for this. Just picture our bathroom. There is a special bowl for cleaning water near the toilet and a towel for drying. What would you do if you didn’t want to waste water? I’m not usually coy but people have started calling me No Toilet Paper Man instead of No Impact Man.

Restaurants, which are mostly out in No Impact, present all sorts of challenges beyond the 250-mile food rule. “They always want to give Isabella the paper cup with the straw, and we have to send it back,” Mr. Beavan said. “We always say, ‘We’re trying not to make any trash.’ And some people get really into that and others clearly think we’re big losers.”

This is the paragraph that screams farce the loudest to me. If they have already brought you the cup and straw then the waste has been made so why send it back. I guess they could have taken them home, used the cup as a flower pot and the straw for a poker for those homemade tampons.

my family rated a 15 I guess because there are 6 of us but if it were only me I scored 6

Green earth = brown hand ??

Musician/celebutante Sheryl Crow proposes a one square of toilet paper-per-sitting quota to offset deforestation.

That's going to be a tough rule to enforce--what with eco-Hollyweirdos so, you know, full of crap.

You may have heard that Laurie David and Sheryl Crow are touring the country, "educating" people about global warming. (Nothin' says college education on climatology like a tour with a TV producer and a rock star!)

But Sheryl had a major brainstorm on how to reduce emissions. I'll let her tell you. http://www.huffingtonpost.com/sheryl...s_b_46320.html

Although my ideas are in the earliest stages of development, they are, in my mind, worth investigating. One of my favorites is in the area of forest conservation which we heavily rely on for oxygen. I propose a limitation be put on how many squares of toilet paper can be used in any one sitting. Now, I don't want to rob any law-abiding American of his or her God-given rights, but I think we are an industrious enough people that we can make it work with only one square per restroom visit, except, of course, on those pesky occasions where 2 to 3 could be required. When presenting this idea to my younger brother, who's judgment I trust implicitly, he proposed taking it one step further. I believe his quote was, "how bout just washing the one square out."

How about just using your hand? Or a rag you carry around? Remind me to give Sheryl a Jose Canseco forearm bash instead of shaking her hand.


Of course, the irony of this kind of talk is thick. A rock concert is once big pollution arena. From all the buses/cars/trucks needed to set up the stage & arena, to shipping in the bottled water, pop, alcohol, food, t-shirts, programs, and the tons of litter left over by a partying rock crowd-- it's just not an arena of conservation. But Sheryl derives most of her income from tours just like this, and she's busing around the country talking about "reducing emissions".

A commenter on her post, timmyslagle, provides a great retort to the critical analysis of one Sheryl Crow:

Trees are part of Agriculture. Like corn and wheat, they are planted by paper and lumber companies, with the full intention of being harvested. Were it not for the demand for wood products, a lot of trees would never be replanted.

A tree absorbs carbon from the atmosphere, and turns it into cellulose. When a paper napkin is disposed of, it goes into a land fill, and that carbon never returns to the atmosphere. Throwing away paper napkins (and used toilet paper) into the trash can is a great way to sequester carbon from the atmosphere. The more you use, the more carbon gets taken out of the atmosphere.

And while he's mistaken (bacteria will break down paper just as they will a fallen tree, just not as fast), he really explains that the forestry industry does quite well in repopulating old-growth clear-cutting with new tree populations.

And I just had to repost these "FACTS" by guitarsandmore:

FACT: In 1950 there were just over 2 billion people on the planet. Today there are over 10 billion.

FACT: Each person who grows up in a developing country will use electricity for light and many other needs. Think, each person will want to buy a car and that car will spew pollution into the air. Each person will become a consumer of precious resources such as clean water, clean air, and fertile soil. Each new person will eventually become a polluter by purchasing goods that are not biodegradable.

FACT: It is the population growth that makes it a requirement to provide additional power sources from somewhere.

The hockey stick graph that Al Gore points to when he talks about carbon dioxide in the air can be directly tied to an increase in population.

In that case, he should be all for war. Kill people steal their resources, so that way they can't use the resources, and there'll be less people to pollute using those resources. All 10 billion of them (the other 4 billion are thetans-- just ask Tom Cruise).

But to seriously suggest that we use "one square" without regard to the public health repercussions of such an endeavor is beyond stupid. It's insane. And that's why I'm handing Ms. Crow a can of Aquanet and a Zippo. Light 'em up, Dan!

http://the-autopsy.blogspot.com/2007...eryl-crow.html