Request: High-impact, low-barrier actions that will reduce the amount of energy consumed by Canadians. This is one of four related questions in four postings. The Town of Canmore, Alberta, partnering with the Bow Valley Sustainability Hub, is piloting a community based social marketing initiative that seeks to change residents behaviours in the arenas of waste, energy, water, and transportation. In a door-to-door canvassing program, residents will be asked to commit to taking one action in one of the arenas. They will be supported with appropriate prompts and incentives. Im soliciting your help in determining our list of suggested actions. Specifically, for those of you with neighbourhood social marketing experience, what have you found to be the best high-impact, low-barrier commitments we can ask residents to make that will reduce the amount of energy they use? Weve already determined that swapping a CFL for an incandescent bulb is one such action. What others can you suggest?
Thank you!
Bart Robinson
Program Director,
Bow Valley Sustainability Hub
Biosphere Institute of the Bow Valley
(403) 678-3445 ext. 1
[email protected]
https:www.pembina.org/wind/wind_power.php
Seeking High-Impact Low-Barrier Actions to Reduce Energy
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I can't tell you how many people I have spoken to who hate programmable thermostats (including me, a former software developer). They are near impossible to figure out and difficult to set. They also fail unpredictably. I'm having mine replaced with an old-fashioned manual dial type. It's a good idea in theory, and maybe there are user-friendlier ones these days, but that we even have to discuss actually having a teacher go around and instruct people on how to use them is indicative of truly ditzy design. Technology like this is a great illustration of how *not* to foster sustainable behavior. But of course, I would maintain that the solution doesn't lie in technology (although technology can help). Turning down a manual thermostat is no more difficult than turning off a light bulb, and a lot less trouble than brushing your teeth. The primary operative element of sustainable is *behavior*, not technology.
Cheers,
Adam
Hi Bart,
We've been operating a showerhead exchange program for the last couple of months in cooperation with one of Melbourne's water retailers, Yarra Valley Water. The program invites people to either drop in to our office or turn up to a showerhead exchange event at a local community centre to swap their existing showerhead for a new water efficient model. The events have been very well attended - we ran out of showerheads last time - and the savings in both water and energy are significant (people are generally swapping showerheads with flow rates of 15-23litres/minute for 9litre/min models). Participants are required to hand in their old showerheads to make sure the new ones actually get installed, and are provided with instruction leaflets with diagrams and simple text eplaining how to remove the old showerhead and install the new one.
Best regards,
Anna Strempel
Household Program Coordinator
Moreland Energy Foundation Ltd
PO Box 276 Brunswick VIC 3056
Ph: (03) 9381 1722
Fax: (03) 9381 1733
www.mefl.com.au
Cut back on red meat (exception: abundant wild, indigenous meat).
Here's an edited version of a recent email I received.
Agricultural activity around the world is responsible for about 22 percent of total greenhouse gas emissions, roughly the same as industry and more than transportation. Livestock production accounts for 80 percent of agriculture’s share, mainly in the form of methane. In a paper published online September 13, 2007 in the medical journal Lancet, researchers from Australia suggest that emissions related to livestock production could be stabilized by 2050 if meat eaters in developed countries cut their daily consumption of meat from roughly eight ounces to 3.17 ounces per day. (This is assuming that no other efforts are made to reduce emissions and that global population increases by 40 percent, as projected.) More food for thought: a Japanese study published in the August, 2007 issue of Animal Science Journal showed that producing 2.2 pounds of beef generates the equivalent of 80.08 pounds of carbon dioxide, more than you would personally account for by driving for three hours or letting a light bulb burn for nearly 20 hours.
Nadia McLaren
EcoIntegrity
Adelaide, Australia
http://www.ecointegrity.org/
+61 (0)8 83 63 46 74
+61 (0)4 34 33 46 74 (mobile)
+61 (0)8 82 68 87 99 (fax)
[email protected]
skype: nadia.mclaren
This is a very interesting post, but there is a statement at the end that can't possibly be correct, which calls into question the correctness of the rest. It is the leaving a light bulb on for 20 hours part that made me scratch my head. Unless it is one heck of a light bulb, leaving it on for 20 hours would use orders of magnitude less energy than driving for 3 hours. Are there some zeros missing?
Joel Gagnon
Hi Joel -
There are lots of assumptions in these figures, as in so many comparisons and estimates of GHG emission. There are roughly 20 lbs of CO2 emitted for each gallon of gas. How many lbs emitted for each kilowatt depends on the source and could vary widely (very little for wind or solar, for example, just to account for manufacture and maintenance) or a lot from coal. Let's take 1.5 lbs of CO2 emission per kWh as a ballpark figure for the sake of argument. Finally, I was unable to confirm the figure of 80.08 lbs of CO2 emissions per 2.2 pounds of meat by looking at the abstract of the Japanese article in Animal Science (full article costs $55 US!), perusing the recent WHO report ("Livestock's Long Shadow") nor the PETA website, but let's take that number, again just for argument's sake. Then, depending on your car's mileage and how fast you're driving, the car estimate could easily be true or not. If it's a light bulb, it would have to consume around 2,500 watts to compete with meat, so I agree, that's a pretty strange number. But the bottom line is undoubtedly true: beef consumption is extraordinarily costly in environmental terms. Now that we know this (and we've actually known the high environmental price of meat for a long time, if not the GHG effects), we can measure or not, calculate or not, but the mandate is clear: we must end our unrestrained eating high on the food chain.
Cheers,
Adam
Joel / Adam,
About the energy-saving measure of not eating meat. Sorry to throw the quotation without thinking about the figures. Yes, the light-bulb comparison is clearly off. I have deleted the email I took it from, but I notice the same error is promulgated on the web, eg http://tinyurl.com/36lcvl
Here's a better version of the same point expressed in what I assume are the original metric units: According to a study published in July by Japanese scientists, a kilogram of beef generates the equivalent of 36.4 kilograms of carbon dioxide, more than the equivalent of driving for three hours while leaving all the lights on back home. (from Cut red meat intake to save planet, http://www.theaustralian.news.com.au/story/0,25197,22411234-30417,00.html)
We seem to agree about the critical issue. Modern agriculture is highly energy consumptive. Cutting back on meat is the simplest thing we can do to reduce that. Of course it depends on the animal and how it is raised. Big difference between chooks in the back yard, free-range lamb and stall-raised veal.
Here's a few more resources on this subject.
Factoring meat into our carbon footprint http://www.onlineopinion.com.au/view.asp?article=6167
Vegetarian is the New Prius http://www.huffingtonpost.com/kathy-freston/vegetarian-is-the-new-pri_b_39014.html
Change your diet, save the planet http://foodpolitics.vox.com/library/post/change-your-diet-save-the-planet.html
As well as PETA, EVANA (European Vegetarian and Animal News Agency) is a good source of news.
Cheers
Nadia
btw I cannot understand why we have so much difficulty persuading Australians that if they must eat meat, eat kangaroo (not the endangered ones; we have around 50 species and a couple are very abundant). It must be our Anglo racial memory that equates with sheep, pigs, cows and the like. The side benefit of substituting kangaroo for introduced animals is, of course, that they are soft-footed and don't damage the soil surface like hoofed grazing animals.
Slow Climate Change By Eating Less Meat
This site has reposted the article (text below) and also has a swathe of further online references.
Nadia
Nadia McLaren
EcoIntegrity Adelaide, Australia
http://www.ecointegrity.org/
+61 (0)8 83 63 46 74
+61 (0)4 34 33 46 74
(mobile) +61 (0)8 82 68 87 99
(fax) [email protected]
skype: nadia.mclaren
EATING LESS MEAT MAY SLOW CLIMATE CHANGE
By Maria Cheng
Associated Press
September 12, 2007
http://news.yahoo.com/s/ap/20070913/ap_on_sc/eating_less_meat
LONDON - Eating less meat could help slow global warming by reducing the number of livestock and thereby decreasing the amount of methane flatulence from the animals, scientists said on Thursday. In a special energy and health series of the medical journal The Lancet, experts said people should eat fewer steaks and hamburgers. Reducing global red meat consumption by 10 percent, they said, would cut the gases emitted by cows, sheep and goats that contribute to global warming. We are at a significant tipping point, said Geri Brewster, a nutritionist at Northern Westchester Hospital in New York, who was not connected to the study. If people knew that they were threatening the environment by eating more meat, they might think twice before ordering a burger, Brewster said. Other ways of reducing greenhouse gases from farming practices, like feeding animals higher- quality grains, would only have a limited impact on cutting emissions. Gases from animals destined for dinner plates account for nearly a quarter of all emissions worldwide. That leaves reducing demand for meat as the only real option,said Dr. John Powles, a public health expert at Cambridge University, one of the study's authors. The amount of meat eaten varies considerably worldwide. In developed countries, people typically eat about 224 grams per day. But in Africa, most people only get about 31 grams a day. With demand for meat increasing worldwide, experts worry that this increased livestock production will mean more gases like methane and nitrous oxide heating up the atmosphere. In China, for instance, people are eating double the amount of meat they used to a decade ago. Powles said that if the global average were 90 grams per day, that would prevent the levels of gases from speeding up climate change. Eating less red meat would also improve health in general. Powles and his co-authors estimate that reducing meat consumption would reduce the numbers of people with heart disease and cancer. One study has estimated that the risk of colorectal cancer drops by about a third for every 100 grams of red meat that is cut out of your diet. As a society, we are overconsuming protein," Brewster said. "If we ate less red meat, it would also help stop the obesity epidemic. Experts said that it would probably take decades to wane the public off of its meat-eating tendency. "We need to better understand the implications of our diet," said Dr. Maria Neira, director of director of the World Health Organization's department of public health and the environment. "It is an interesting theory that needs to be further examined," she said. "But eating less meat could definitely be one way to reduce gas emissions and climate change."
Here is the paragraph from the article. The statistic was actually taken from a separate study (Casey JW, Holden NM. 2005. Analysis of greenhouse gas emissions from the average Irish milk production system. Agricultural Systems 86, 97-114.) No comparison is made to the equivalent GHG impacts of other human activities.
"Casey and Holden (2006) also estimated greenhouse gas emissions from Irish suckler beef units and reported that the average emissions from conventional beef production was 13.0 kg of CO2 equivalents per kg of live weight during 1 year. Assuming the beef yield percentage as 40%, this amount of emissions could be converted 32.1 kg of CO2 equivalents per kg of beef from the live weight of the cattle and the number of cattle sold. The beef production system they analyzed resembles the Japanese system in some respects, such as feeding concentrates and a long feeding time of 24 months. Thus, the amounts of emissions of both systems seem to be relatively similar."
Hope this helps.
Hannah
Hannah Aoyagi, Ph.D.
Community Outreach & Environmental Education Specialist
Toxics Cleanup Program,
Southwest Regional Office
Washington State
Department of Ecology
360.407.6790
[email protected]
On 24-Sep-07, at 1:01 PM, Adam Sacks wrote: But the bottom line is undoubtedly true: beef consumption is extraordinarily costly in environmental terms. Now that we know this (and we've actually known the high environmental price of meat for a long time, if not the GHG effects), we can measure or not, calculate or not, but the mandate is clear: we must end our unrestrained eating high on the food chain.
There's an interesting and quite balanced article "Green Meat" in Halifax's weekly, The Coast.
http://www.thecoast.ns.ca/1editorialbody.lasso?-token.folder=2007-09 -20&-token.story=150886.113118&-token.subpub=
Is it possible to be an environmentally conscious meat-eater? Lezlie Low asks.
She makes the point that some meat production/eating can be green and can in fact be greener than dining on crops that might be grown on the same land. She discusses grass fed animals on pasturage and hay from fields that would not be suitable for crop production. She goes on to discuss the meat's post-farm "green-ness", the environmental costs of processes and regulations that determine how the livestock on the farm is converted to the meat on our tables.
Peter Zimmer
Some methods for producing meat are "greener" than others. And some meat is a useful component of the human diet. Some land may not support crops directly consumable by humans. That said, I am not sure if land that is so marginal it can't produce crops can be used to produce useful amounts of silage for animals. And even if it could support that sort of growth, why use the plants on such land to feed animals, why not just leave the land in some wild state supporting local wild species of plants with the attendant insect/bird etc populations? There are models for more or less closed cycle sustainable village production models that incorporate some animal based protein into the models-the international aid group Heiffer promotes them. Even if green methods can be used to produce some meat, A.in general producing meat is a highly inefficient mechanism for converting sunlight and soil nutrients into human calories, B.using marginal hayland etc is not likely to produce enough meat to meet the current US "standard" meat consumption patterns, and so C.the non-sustainable practices of factory meat farming, clear cutting rain forest for grazing land etc have emerged to "meet" the demand. So reducing overall levels of meat consumption (especially in the US given the high levels here) and thus production, will have a beneficial effect on the environment. Has someone analyzed the impact of mass meat processing with its waste disposal issues, and the burdens of refrigerating and transporting fresh meat?
I have posted this on the forum before but it is worth mentioning again:
There are a couple of other aspects of why meat eating can nudge up the GHG contribution besides the flatulence of ruminants.
1.A great deal of meat eaten world wide is intensively farmed. As such they are fed a very high energy food.
2.That food is sourced world wide for price reasons so much of is well travelled - especially soy bean, much of which comes from Brazillian rainforest land and therefore responsible for tree loss.
3.Lastly the grain used in intensive agriculture is grown on fields fertilized with artificial nitrogenous materials such as urea or Ammonium Nitrate. These materials are produced industrially by the Harber-Bosch process which is intensively exothermic - that is requires very large amounts of energy. We could still live very luxuriant lives with a little less meat and especially so if those animals are raised on pasture and kept humanely prior to slaughter.
Cheers,
Patrick
Fleeing Reality Clean Coal
Patrick Forman
Technical Officer
School of Social Science and Liberal Studies
Charles Sturt University
Bathurst, NSW, Australia 2795
Tel: +61 2 6338 4087
fac: +61 2 6338 4401
Mon to Wed 8:30 - 4:30
One very high impact action would be related to thermostat management. Many people, here in the DC area at least, have programmable thermostats that they don't know how to set so they just don't use them. I wonder if you could have a program where the door-to-door canvassers could be trained to actually set these thermostats for people? It would require that people actually let the canvassers into their homes, so it would require a level of safety and comfort. Unfortunately I don't know of any place that has tried this, so no data to offer. Of course, asking people to simply set their thermostat lower (and put on a sweater) during the winter is another action they could suggest, which is much simpler.
Merrilee Harrigan
Vice President for Education Alliance to Save Energy
1850 M St NW Suite 600
202-530-2215
[email protected] ase.org