I spent yesterday in S.F. and am still amazed that I was able to attend 2 separate conferences that focused on carbon offsets and carbon footprints within 15 blocks of one another. Moscone Center hosted the larger one, which focused on the emerging market for offsets and seemed to be well attended by brokers and others who make up a typical commodity marketplace. My biggest impression from this one was the huge international contingent, particularly European. This appears to be one new market opportunity where the EU has a significant head start, and I’m sure the companies who have “figured it out there” are chomping at the bit to take a leadership position in the U.S. market.

The smaller conference focused on measuring carbon footprints of consumer products. It seemed to be a mix of consulting firms and auditors on the vendor side and rather large technology and product companies who were there to learn about footprint measurement methodologies. I listened to part of a talk given by the head of sustainability at the Mars Corporation, and he said something that stuck with me. He was discussing the full lifecycle of dog food, and he was contrasting the primary contributors to their product’s footprint with the areas of the footprint that his company can reasonably impact.

He showed how the raw materials (agriculture) and consumer purchase and consumption were the parts of the lifecycle that are most carbon intensive. The product manufacturing phase, and even somewhat the distribution portion of the lifecycle, were relatively efficient and therefore not large contributors to the footprint. The point he made was that the ingredients of the product (particularly beef) are demanded by consumers, and those same consumers demand convenient packaging. In other words, until consumers are willing to alter these demands, there is not much that the producer can do to make a significant impact on the overall footprint. As much as companies need to change their ways and get greener, I have a feeling as we continue to peel the onion on this climate change crisis we will find that the consumer is going to have to make some drastic, perhaps even painful, choices along the way.

I am a member of the Cool Los Altos team, a group of volunteers who is helping our city and its residents reduce our carbon emissions. We managed to get the City Council and Mayor to agree to adopt the Mayor’s Climate Protection Agreement last month (yeah!), and now we’re putting together plans for how to get our city’s residents at large to adopt a greener lifestyle in the months ahead.

So we’re struggling with the question of what changes to ask people to make. When you look at the options for changes that we can promote to our residents, there are many. They range from reducing the amount you drive to lowering your thermostat at home to taking shorter showers. But when I tried to think through all the options and come up with a framework for deciding where to start, I came up with 3 criteria that help to determine the best options: ease of adoption, impact on the environment, and measurability. For now, I’m trying to decide between “ease” and “impact”.

In my opinion, realistically, most people will not make wholesale changes to their lifestyle in a short period of time. And many carbon-reducing options are not realistic for large segments of the population (e.g. how many of us live and work near train or bus routes?).

My personal bias is for relatively easy, incremental changes. Clearly the changes required for us to overcome global warming are massive and systemic, so we need to start the ball rolling at a basic level that everyone can adopt. When combined with a growing awareness of other changes that we can make and the impact of each - coupled with the confidence that comes from having made 1 change successfully - I think we’ll see a depth and breadth of adoption that will surprise us a couple years from now.

One of our neighboring cities (Palo Alto for those who are interested) has decided to push reusable bags as a major initiative. On the one hand, replacement of plastic and paper bags with a reusable bag is estimated to save only 80 pounds of CO2 annually per person; but, it does qualify as a relatively easy lifestyle change. It also occurs to me that it’s a good choice for a community-wide initiative because it’s one of the few activities that occurs in a public setting, thus introducing the ever-powerful force of peer pressure (you *will* sense the eyes of others upon you when asked “paper or plastic?”).

I’m interested to hear from others what changes they think are the most important to promote to others at this point. Is it the easy to adopt and implement ones, or is it the ones that have the most impact on our environment?

Kent
www.ecounit.com

Okay, so it’s not exactly my new Nissan hybrid. Which, by the way, got 550 miles on its first tank. I literally drove 3 weeks on 1 tank of gas - incredible. The overall MPG during the period was about 35…not bad!

So why should hybrids be afraid? Because the Tesla (I got to sit in this one at a recent fundraiser for Bing Nursery School at Stanford) and other zero-emissions vehicles are on the way. As long as they can figure out how to produce them in a relatively eco-friendly way, this is clearly the vehicle of the future.

With all this talk of carbon credits and cap & trade, I started thinking about the possibility of personal carbon credits. In other words, if we continue to head in a direction where greenhouse gas emissions are measured, limited, and tradeable, it’s not unrealistic that individuals would get in the game. So, just like a company that is “better than average” will be able to generate carbon credits that it can sell, a person who is “better than average” could potentially generate carbon credits for dollars. At last, revenge of the environmentalists!

As interesting as the idea is, I tend to think it won’t happen. The primary reason is the difficulty of verification (e.g. who will certify that I rode my bike to work today?). Also, to the extent that certain activies are verifiable, the availability of the data and the ability of some third-party to access the data will invariably lead to privacy concerns (e.g. would you want your daily electricity usage to be publicly available?). And even though some of these issues can be overcome, we still have the sticky fact that limiting one’s access to basic resources is anti-American (read: who’s to say I’m only allotted 20 gallons of water per day?).

All that said, I can see a future where generating personal carbon credits will happen, albeit under a different name. As solar becomes more commonplace, it could become commonplace for utilities to credit individuals who give back to the grid. If a utility is able to buy and sell carbon credits, an individual’s ability to sell solar energy to the utility essentially makes them a player in the carbon market.

For those who may stumble upon this post, my apologies for grossly over-simplifying a very complex scenario (but if you’ve read my other post you were forewarned). If you have something to contribute - especially if it helps to correct or clarify what I’ve written - by all means do so!

Kent
www.ecounit.com

Wow, I just read that Bay Area pollution regulators have proposed to charge companies a fee for each ton of greenhouse gases that they emit! On the surface this may not sound all that groundbreaking, but it absolutely is. Consider that until now all efforts to regulate emissions have been voluntary. If this proposal passes, it would be the first legally mandated regulation in the U.S. which would result in financial consequences for greenhouse gas emitters. Apparently the air district, which is a state agency, is expected to vote on the proposal in May.

The proposed fee is small - only 4.2 cents per ton of greenhouse gas - because it’s designed to fund the cost of the Bay Area’s global warming reduction programs. In other words, it’s not intended to offset the actual “cost” of the greenhouse gases.

But isn’t that the next obvious step? And doesn’t this mean that virtually all emissions will need to be measured and audited? And once there’s a reliable or at least accepted system for measurement, shouldn’t we assume that further “management” of these emissions will occur? This sounds to me like the first step in what will be a long (yet inevitable) series of steps towards the political portion of the global warming solution.

It’s taken a bit of time, but it appears that government is now joining consumers and businesses in recognizing that they have a role to play if we’re going to address global warming as well as the multitude of other environmental challenges that we face.

One of the on-going mysteries associated with the environmental challenges we’re facing is: if everyone knows that we have a problem, and everyone is motivated to make some changes in order to improve the situation, why is it so hard to get more than a few people to do the right thing? Of course there are many answers to this question, but one that strikes me is the importance of immediacy. What I mean by that is that I believe people *will* change their behaviors in ways that help the environment (or hurt it less) if they are given relevant, timely feedback about the impact that their actions are having.

As a proud new hybrid owner I am experiencing this effect first-hand. As I watch my miles per gallon reading during each outing (the hybrid’s computer shows a lot of MPG-related data - very cool), I find that I’m compelled to take advantage of the gas-saving features more than I ever did in conventional cars. I am much more conscious of the “cost” of passing another driver, and I’m much happier to coast down hills with only the battery on.

Extending this principle to other parts of our daily lives, I can see a future when each of us is able to easily see the gas, electric, and water meters in our homes…and simply by seeing them (moving in the “wrong”direction) we will feel compelled to turn off lights, turn the thermostat down, and take shorter showers. Somehow the monthly bills - even though they show monthly and year-on-year comparisons and often times include financial inducements to lower our usage - just aren’t timely enough to get us to make meaningful changes.

Out of sight, out of mind…

Kent Ragen
www.ecounit.com