Your house may not be your biggest contributer to global
warming. Credit: Jim Gunshinan.
My focus in this blog had been on green homes, but there are other areas of our lives that account for our total carbon footprint--how much carbon we are responsible for adding to the atmosphere--a measure of our contribution to global warming. Our houses and apartments, but also our cars, air travel, and the food we eat all contribute.
Don Fugler, who does research for the Canada Housing and Mortgage Corporation, estimated the amount each area of our lives contributes to our carbon footprint. He used a hypothetical family of four (two adults, two kids) in Ottawa, with a medium-sized house (2,400 square feet), and two cars (Ford Explorer and Honda Fit) to do the calculations. Both parents work and travel about 20 miles roundtrip to work each weekday. The kids travel a few miles each day back and forth to school. Both parents make a total of five trips to Toronto and five trips to other places each year for business, and the family goes on a yearly ski trip to Whistler by air travel, and back and forth by car to visit relatives in Nova Scotia once a year.
For us Californians, replace Ottawa with Oakland, Whistler with Lake Tahoe, add a trip to Hawaii, and subtract most of the energy used for heating a house, and I think we come close to the Canadian example.
The folks who brought us the movie also gave us a nifty
carbon calculator. Use it to measure the size of your carbon
footprint (go to www.climatecrisis.net/takeaction).
Credit: www.climatecrisis.net
