We're "zero carbon" at home for heat and light!

[DamonHD]

Just been adding up on my fingers and toes and for electricity and heat we're now on 60kgCO2e net emissions per person per year down from 3tCO2e emissions per person when we moved in a few years ago, and that's even though this year has had about 30% more heating-degree days than any other since we started conserving!

Rgds

Damon

[Volvo farmer]

if only the other 6,890,628,873 people on this earth would do the same thing, all our problems would be over!

[DamonHD]

Well, I also have to stop eating, and buying goods with embedded carbon/energy of course!  %-P

Rgds

Damon

[TomW]

How much CO2 does approximately 400 acres of hardwood timber sequester a year?

Then subtract the carbon reintroduced by burning a pile of that same timber.

We burn a prodigious amount of gasoline and a couple hundred KW of grid electric a month heat with local cord wood cut on the farm.

I never ran the numbers but I think we are on the positive end of the line?

Every time I see carbon credits etc I wonder where my numbers would be?

Sorry to digress but we protected this land from the clear cut make it farmland craze and I guess that means we were "carbon friendly" before carbon was cool? 

Actually it is a better payback selling logs over getting rent for crop land or farming it myself. Trees just do their thing and removing mature trees is about all we do to maintain it.

I think what you are doing is "the right thing" but I see so much hype around the general subject in advertising and media that I am jaded.

Anyway, its your Diary so I will shut up now.

Tom

[wpowokal]

I guess I too should stick my hand up as being or close to carbon neutral (too lazy to do any calculations), my home and fruit packing shed run on Re, now that must be a positive, I have planted hundreds of trees since taking over this farm. On the negative side we do use water with gay abandon (watering commercial crops and home garden).

Although I do not support the theory of "global warming"(old enough to have seen it all before, and not being an academic am not seeking any grants) I do support every person who acts in a responsible manner, as we all should. Allan tips his hat to Damon for his contribution.

allan

[DamonHD]

TomW,

To my mind, burning local "biomass" as it is now to be called (or "wood" if you insist) is a zero carbon activity except mainly for the small amount of fossil fuels (etc) you may use to manage it, chop it up, etc.

And of course your local PV and wind is another bunch of virtually zero-carbon energy that you're not sucking in from the grid, also very good.

If your 400 acres is mature, you're not sequestering any extra per year, but hanging on to what you already have is good.  (My view is that carbon credits should generally only be available for net new forest/woodland planting and growth.)

Sounds like other than your crazy gasoline habit you are indeed DoingTheRightThing(TM).

Please don't shut up!

Rgds

Damon

[DamonHD]

Thanks Allan.

Yep, regardless of views on global warming, I think that conservation of valuable resources and pollution reduction (eg all the non-CO2 nasties in coal-fired generator smokestacks) stand on their own feet as the right things to do, but I'm late to the party having only noticed a very few years ago.

Rgds

Damon

[TomW]

If your 400 acres is mature, you're not sequestering any extra per year, but hanging on to what you already have is good.  (My view is that carbon credits should generally only be available for net new forest/woodland planting and growth.)

Rgds

Damon

True with one proviso:

Every time we harvest logs those big trees being removed open up the canopy immensely. It looks kind of spooky all those big "holes". Within a couple years the holes disappear when the neighboring trees put on a massive race to fill the hole.

The woodlands process as I see it is the trunks go into lumber, cabinet wood, etc and stays locked in that form unless or until it burns or rots. The brushy parts mostly decompose into the timber floor.  We burn a couple three cords for heat which dumps its carbon into the environment (air). All of these processes only return carbon that was already in the environment during its life. In the end it is all "current" carbon so that would still be neutral?

The petrol and grid energy are unavoidable for us at this point in our life.

The turbines and solar panels are carbon impacts at manufacturing but over the lifetime they should "help".

We make a real effort to consume local and organic food as much as possible so that avoids petrochemical farming methods and shipping to some extent and another subtle bump to the carbon thing but done for unrelated reasons.

Makes my head hurt to think on it.

And in my misspent youth I burned tires to get rid of brush piles so I got a long ways to go to balance that.


Tom

[DamonHD]

Yes, forgot about the lumber sequestering carbon in someone's house or furniture, but difficult to keep track of once it out of your hands (and too easy to be fiddled for the carbon credit stuff I suspect on a larger scale).

Rgds

Damon

[wpowokal]

Bottom line I suspect is covered by a quote often seen in national parks here in OZ " leave nothing but your footprints".

allan

[TomW]

Bottom line I suspect is covered by a quote often seen in national parks here in OZ " leave nothing but your footprints".

allan

I have seen:

"Take nothing but pictures and leave nothing but footprints" on park signs here. 

Tom

[bob g]

"leave nothing behind buy your footprints"

(and we would prefer you take them with you as well)



bob g

[Boss]

This is a fantastic conversation, and I am so glad it is what it is: Earthy and civilised. Our family also lives in the forest, for four decades now. I was brought up by a conservationist, yet still I wonder if our behaviour through the years has adversely affected the environment greatly, and if the processes we now attempt to perform are more defensive in nature, or truly acts of good for all people. I recently asked my dying father, a scientist turned minister, how we can more simply determine if what we are doing is good or evil?
He simply stated if we are helping someone other than ourselves, we're probably doing good.
  
We also periodically harvest wood from our 150 acres of Ponderosa pine forest. We built the house we're living i now from our share of the timber we harvested ten years ago. Does this make us greener than the next guy? Don't know, although it does make us feel good. I truly believe we set a good example for others. What few people see is as Tom said, an incredible benefit to the land our constant forest maintenance. Carbon positive? Maybe, but I can not  spend time discussing how good we think we are, when forests are being disfigured all over the south-west US in the name of water sheds. Clear cutting forest by timber companies past and present isn't as bad as what is happening to forests with this new water shed nonsense. At least the timber companies maintained the forest, why wouldn't they, timber after all is their livelihood, and most importantly trees are a natural and renewable resource.  
I don't have any answers, especially after I looked up what energy cap and trade is, OMG.
End rant, for now.



boss this is your one free photo size edit the original you posted was huge and messed up the formatting of the page. do that again and i will just remove it.
Kurt

[JW]

Kurt,

 That may be my fault, I recently turned off the "frame limiter" set it to 0 (which will allow anysize attachnemt, as long as the attachment is under 150k, I figured since the scroll bar was there it was ok. The setting is located in "attachment settings"

JW

[kurt]

it was not a attachment it was a off site photo using the {image} code and it was huge.

[wpowokal]

I seen it as a virgin and was quite impressive, then it still is, nice one Boss.

[Boss]

Thanks for the favorable vote on the photo
In my opinion size matters, yes the photo still looks good shrunk to 480 pixels, in my own defence the image was well under the 150k file size, and it still looks high quality, obviously it is the moderators' prerogative to remove pictures, although I will argue that most modern screens are now 1024 wide, the file size,  when excessive, causes trouble for users with slower connections, however, this is a small file for the viewing size. What I am most sorry about is that adding what I hope was an inspiring  photo  may have taken away from the gist of any point I may have been making about the important issue of carbon foot prints, oh well. 

[JW]

The reason (image size) recently did that, is becuse I messed around with some of the settings.

Kurt has a good point, I had not considered what could happen with remotely hosted pictures. Im going to reset this tommorow, since we need a special size with the proper aspect ratio. I have a program on another computer that will give me the numbers im looking for. The reason I changed the setting, was because I needed to be able to view a "wider" image. Im glad this came up because I had forgotton about the setting change.

JW

[DamonHD]

Back to the point...  B^>

I just went and 'upgraded' an annoyingly slow-start and dim 9W CFL in our hallway downstairs with a 7W LED bought from a moderate-size retailer in our town centre (ie non-specialist).  It's brighter and instant-on and a pleasant colour.  I'll post some pics in my mini-review later:

http://www.earth.org.uk/LED-lighting.html#north7W

The point being that what was a 40W lamp then a 9W is now a 7W with decent light output and should basically never need changing again under normal circumstances...  So with a little effort it's possible to go on squeezing consumption in some areas.

I was amazed in fact that we'd shaved another ~20% from our gross electricity consumption (from just under 2000kWh/y to just over 1500kWh/y).  We only imported about 1000kWh in 2010 which is less than a third of the average per household, and our natural gas consumption is similarly less than one third of the average for the UK.  And each of those is about half that for the US I think...  %-P

Rgds

Damon