Behaviour Change Due to Calculators

hi Ron

I've never read anything on this topic but I belong to an NGO that is planning quite a big trial using carbon calculators to try and change behavior. I am hoping they will let me measure the effect among a small percentage of the people in the trial....so, might have some information for you in 5 months. I think carbon calculators should be effective because they are a kind of feedback mechanism (the idea is they get an email each month reminding them to go and fill in the calculator again and see if their emissions have changed). Anybody else heard of anything like this?

Thanks
Lucy

Lucy,

I hope your team realizes that many major CO2-generating activities are quite seasonal and also contain periodic spikes that make month-to-month comparisons difficult or even meaningless for individuals. The time-frame needs to be at least year-over-year (13 months of recordkeeping). For example, heating fuel use usually spikes in winter. Electricity will be much higher in summer in hot climates where air conditioning is common, or in winter elsewhere. Air travel, which can be a huge part of the carbon footprint for middle-class and wealthy individuals in developed countries, is often spiky. In the US many people fly only during summer holidays or at Thanksgiving or Christmas when we visit relatives. If you compare your carbon footprint in January to your footprint in December, you may think you've made great progress simply because you flew to see your family for Christmas but didn't get on a plane in January. Major, permanent changes in a family's carbon footprint - one's that aren't just random fluctuations -- usually require capital investment or a significant change in behavior. For example, to REALLY reduce your footprint you need to do things like:

1) buy a more fuel-efficient car
2) change most of your light bulbs to CFLs
3) switch from driving solo to carpooling or taking transit to work
4) get a job that requires a shorter commute
5) insulate your home to a higher standard
6) intentionally and permanently cut back on air travel
7) install solar photovoltaic or solar domestic hot water systems

In my opinion, the kind of cheap and easy suggestions that are often given about lowering our energy use - such as setting water heaters to 120 degrees F or taking shorter showers - are unlikely to produce unambiguous evidence of cost savings or CO2 reduction even when meticulously tracked over a period of a year. Annual fluctuations in weather, which cause increases or decreases in heating degree days and cooling degree days, will swamp the effect the participant is trying to measure. That's not to say that these actions don't save energy, it's just that you can't PROVE they do based on one family's data. A better approach, I think, would be to create a points-based system where your participants get a certain number of points for taking actions. For example, turning down your water heater may be worth 1 point, replacing incandescents with CFLs could get 1 point per bulb and shortening your commute could get 1 point per mile. (These figures are just examples, I haven't done the math to validate that they produce equivalent environmental benefit.) This approach requires less tracking and may lend itself to friendly competition and setting up a "ladder of green-ness" like the colored belts offered in karate and judo that inspires people to work their way up the ladder of accomplishment.

Best Regards,
Bruce Karney

[email protected]
+1 650 450-0332 (mobile)
+1 650 964-3567 (home office)
+1 650 903-0954 (fax)
833 Bush St.,
Mountain View, CA 94041 USA

[email protected] wrote:

Major, permanent changes in a family's carbon footprint - one's that aren't just random fluctuations -- usually require capital investment or a significant change in behavior. For example, to REALLY reduce your footprint you need to do things like:
1) buy a more fuel-efficient car

This may be a good suggestion if you buy an existing (as opposed to brand new) car that gets better mileage than your existing car (assuming it puts out less GHGs). I was under the impression that the process of manufacturing an automobile produces more greenhouse gases than that car will release during its entire lifetime on the road. Granted that when it comes time for (essential) replacement of the vehicle comes, it is appropriate to "upgrade" to a more fuel-efficient car, it doesn't follow that replacing a tuned and emissions-checked vehicle with a new one is actually going to reduce one's carbon footprint. It is the same mistake that neo-classical economics makes when it considers concomittant pollution an externality. The purchase merely displaces the carbon impact from the consumer to the manufacturer. I've also heard that hybrids produce nearly twice as much pollution to manufacture due to their dual-powertrain architecture. And then there is the likelihood of Jeavon's Paradox rearing its ugly head by having hybrid or more-efficient car owners justify longer and more frequent trips since they are getting better mileage during them. Reducing the amount of miles driven or gasoline consumed for transportation is a better suggestion in my opinion. Lobbying your locality to allow for higher density and mixed-use zoning is another "intangible" that the calculator approach would fail to capture. It is precisely this form of "reduction of the communal carbon footprint" that I profess will change the planet more than a series of individual micro-actions. Some things don't lend themselves to quantification. Look at the folly of using GDP as an indicator of prosperity: the USA leads the world in the amount spent on health care to treat all our maladies (physical and psychological), and leads the world in the number of cosmetic surgeries. These both contribute _positively_ to the GDP (which has no place for negative values like pollution, non-renewable resource extraction, declining health, social injustice/inequality, etc.). How crazy is that?

Cheers,
Jim Zack
Sustainable Saratoga Springs (NY)

Hi, as a side comment to carbon calculators, we recently conducted an informal review (audit) of 6 carbon calculators from leading organisations in Australia. We conducted this review as part of our investigation into the assumptions that are created behind the calculations in the calculators. Our focus was on the air travel sections within the respective sites. To conduct the test we entered the same information (one way from Melbourne to Sydney, approx 707kilometres) into each of the 6 carbon calculators and recorded the amount of CO2 emitted in kilograms. The results were very surprising to say the least. For example: The lowest amount of CO2 emitted according to one calculator was 128kg for the trip and the highest was 650kg for the exact same trip. Our conclusions were that the calculators could not be relied unless the user had a full understanding on the assumptions that go into the calculators. The problem with this is that some calculators fail to list their assumptions on their site. On investigation we found that some calculators record CO2 emissions at sea level for air travel and other compare a various altitudes. It would be great to know if anyone else has conducted a similar test and if so, we would appreciate some more information to assist in our work.

Regards,
Doug Smith

CEO Village Green Environmental Solutions Pty Ltd
2 Stephenson Street Richmond,
Victoria 3121 Australia
e: [email protected]
w: www.villagegreen.com.au
p: 03 9017 5017
f: 03 9017 5181
m: 0418559908

Dear Jim

Thanks for your thoughts. You said "Lobbying your locality to allow for higher density and mixed-use zoning is another "intangible" that the calculator approach would fail to capture. It is precisely this form of "reduction of the communal carbon footprint" that I profess will change the planet more than a series of individual micro-actions." I absolutely agree with you that these kinds of political action are very important to achieve reductions in carbon at a global level. However, from a "stages of change" perspective, we feel like the vast majority of people in our country are probably more ready to make small changes in their own individual lifestyles than to lobby for political change. The idea is that we our initial contacts with people will involve encouragement to make changes in their own lifestyles, then as time passes and we maintain contact with them and they become more involved in the issue, we hope that they will become ready to take political action as well. It is a good point, however, that this kind of thing should contribute to a carbon calculator. Perhaps, rather than trying to calculate peoples' carbon emissions accurately (which is obviously very difficult to do anyway) we should run the whole thing as a kind of points system, where the more actions you take the more points you get? Obviously, big actions would get more points than small ones.

Thanks
Lucy