[how about a sustainability conversation category?]
----
A major advantage of taking a whole systems view is that it helps you understand that it takes a whole system to deliver any individual product and make it useful. If you buy an apple, for example, what your $1 pays for is supporting everything in the lifestyles of the many people who helped bring it to you. Unless in delivering a product there is a special low impact 'value added', like an artist's signature, or a special high impact 'value added' like the source cost of fuels, every dollar spent probably has about as much responsibility for the whole system's impacts as any other.
Last Wednesday at the end of the day I finally got to the point in my CO2 inventory templates where I needed to start plugging in the real figures. I'd actually been avoiding looking at that page in the data for a few months, knowing that it would contain something like a secret I'd rather not know about. I was in sort of intentionally avoiding it. It turns out that spending the average $1 (adjusting DOE long term statistics for inflation and efficiency trends) releases about 12oz of CO2. The DOE measurement is .57metric tons per $1000 in 1995$. http://www.eia.doe.gov/emeu/cabs/carbonemiss/chapter1.html
When you buy a 12 oz bottle of spring water for $1 the money goes to support all the things the people who brought it to you do with it, simply because that's how they use the money you give them. The water itself is free from nature of course. What you buy is the service of bringing it to you in the altered form you like. That's how an average $1 spent on 12 oz of water also comes to release into the air an equal weight of CO2. Every time you spend $1 on an average purchase it adds another 12 oz to the atmosphere. Every time you spend around a couple hundred bucks, on average, you put your own body weight in CO2 into the atmosphere. Our Thanksgiving dinners last week, including the travel of those coming from some distance, might easily have released a weight of CO2 equal to the combined weight of the attendees.
--
For me the implications of this are rather disturbing, making it clear that just 'pairing down a little' won't accomplish much. The residence time of CO2 is about 380 years, making everything we do a contribution to altering all the balances of nature for more than ten generations. Of course it wouldn't matter if the distortions were small and temporary. All the evidence is that they will be large and accumulating for a very long time. Maybe the valuable thing this information displays is the extreme separation between what our purchases mean to us and what they do in our world. The real direct effects of lots of things simply have no meaning for people at all. Mostly we don't look or care to look, but it seems bound to have evolutionary effect! After today you may never look at a bottle of spring water the same way again, though. Sorry, but we need to know!
think about how much CO2 you personally huffed from your lungs going to get that bottled water when there is a perfectly good tap likely within a few feet.
Phil- there is a [url=http://www.archinect.com/forum/threads.php?id=56663_0_42_0_C]sustainability[/url ] discussion at archinect and you're welcome to join in. Or you can make many new posts to discuss the same topic over and over again. It's your call - but my money is for you to keep the proliferation of threads to a minimum to gain the most participation in this subject. We archinecteur's are touchy that way (sorta like AIA-COTE, but we have a sense of humor). There was a gentleman from the Netherlands who never learned the netiquette and has been banished as a troll. Your idea is too important to have the same fate - so please play by the unspoken rules. If in doubt, please ask - I'm happy to show you the ropes.
Twelve ounces of co2 is a lot of green-house-gas wrapped into a single buck - so thank you for crunching the numbers to determine this... but does it matter where that dollar is spent? Like if I went to walmart versus the local farmers market?
Your next step (beyond screaming from every mountaintop) is to show us (and I mean the entire green community - the rest will follow), how we can alter this 'average' and spend our money wisely. We can't/won't stop spending (even if there is a recession) since we gotta eat and gotta heat. If we all burned wood for our fuel, we'd return to the 19th century where new england was completely deforested several times over and the entire planet would look like Haiti.
Thanks for the link Barry, but I don't understand. How do you post to the sustainability discussion page if there isn't one? I found the 'Green Central' page you sent, but it looks like a single thread. I’ll post this there too, I guess.
As to how to redirect our dollars, the choices will become more clear when we begin to think in terms of $'s=CO2. There are some obvious exceptions though. When an artist signs a piece of work it's $value increases dramatically without any energy input. The opposite is true for energy intense products. The trick is to factor those exceptions to the average CO2 content in.
To do the math turns out to be like doing your taxes... i.e. not real hard once you have the numbers to plug in but a nuisance. Collecting the numbers, though, can be a real hassle. So the best part of this whole system measurement method? When it's really a hassle to collect the detailed CO2 numbers is when using the easy to calculate average CO2 content is probably going to be more accurate.
Looking at the real CO2 contribution of the whole process of delivering your goods and services includes so many things we've all been leaving out it'll take a little getting used to. My method gives an estimate about 50 times as high as the http://buildcarbonneutral.org/ estimate, for example. That's because my approach is all inclusive, treating both the life cycle building costs and the operating costs. http://www.synapse9.com/design/TBalanceInventory.xls for the template and http://www.synapse9.com/design/ for other stuff
The worst part (which is also where the totally taboo trap door is located) is in the CO2 contribution of the money you don't spend, that you just leave alone to multiply all bye itself... ;-)
Nov 26, 07 11:43 am ·
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How much CO2 in $1 ?
[how about a sustainability conversation category?]
----
A major advantage of taking a whole systems view is that it helps you understand that it takes a whole system to deliver any individual product and make it useful. If you buy an apple, for example, what your $1 pays for is supporting everything in the lifestyles of the many people who helped bring it to you. Unless in delivering a product there is a special low impact 'value added', like an artist's signature, or a special high impact 'value added' like the source cost of fuels, every dollar spent probably has about as much responsibility for the whole system's impacts as any other.
Last Wednesday at the end of the day I finally got to the point in my CO2 inventory templates where I needed to start plugging in the real figures. I'd actually been avoiding looking at that page in the data for a few months, knowing that it would contain something like a secret I'd rather not know about. I was in sort of intentionally avoiding it. It turns out that spending the average $1 (adjusting DOE long term statistics for inflation and efficiency trends) releases about 12oz of CO2. The DOE measurement is .57metric tons per $1000 in 1995$. http://www.eia.doe.gov/emeu/cabs/carbonemiss/chapter1.html
When you buy a 12 oz bottle of spring water for $1 the money goes to support all the things the people who brought it to you do with it, simply because that's how they use the money you give them. The water itself is free from nature of course. What you buy is the service of bringing it to you in the altered form you like. That's how an average $1 spent on 12 oz of water also comes to release into the air an equal weight of CO2. Every time you spend $1 on an average purchase it adds another 12 oz to the atmosphere. Every time you spend around a couple hundred bucks, on average, you put your own body weight in CO2 into the atmosphere. Our Thanksgiving dinners last week, including the travel of those coming from some distance, might easily have released a weight of CO2 equal to the combined weight of the attendees.
--
For me the implications of this are rather disturbing, making it clear that just 'pairing down a little' won't accomplish much. The residence time of CO2 is about 380 years, making everything we do a contribution to altering all the balances of nature for more than ten generations. Of course it wouldn't matter if the distortions were small and temporary. All the evidence is that they will be large and accumulating for a very long time. Maybe the valuable thing this information displays is the extreme separation between what our purchases mean to us and what they do in our world. The real direct effects of lots of things simply have no meaning for people at all. Mostly we don't look or care to look, but it seems bound to have evolutionary effect! After today you may never look at a bottle of spring water the same way again, though. Sorry, but we need to know!
think about how much CO2 you personally huffed from your lungs going to get that bottled water when there is a perfectly good tap likely within a few feet.
Phil- there is a [url=http://www.archinect.com/forum/threads.php?id=56663_0_42_0_C]sustainability[/url ] discussion at archinect and you're welcome to join in. Or you can make many new posts to discuss the same topic over and over again. It's your call - but my money is for you to keep the proliferation of threads to a minimum to gain the most participation in this subject. We archinecteur's are touchy that way (sorta like AIA-COTE, but we have a sense of humor). There was a gentleman from the Netherlands who never learned the netiquette and has been banished as a troll. Your idea is too important to have the same fate - so please play by the unspoken rules. If in doubt, please ask - I'm happy to show you the ropes.
Twelve ounces of co2 is a lot of green-house-gas wrapped into a single buck - so thank you for crunching the numbers to determine this... but does it matter where that dollar is spent? Like if I went to walmart versus the local farmers market?
Your next step (beyond screaming from every mountaintop) is to show us (and I mean the entire green community - the rest will follow), how we can alter this 'average' and spend our money wisely. We can't/won't stop spending (even if there is a recession) since we gotta eat and gotta heat. If we all burned wood for our fuel, we'd return to the 19th century where new england was completely deforested several times over and the entire planet would look like Haiti.
arghhh I hate when links don't work
try this
Thanks for the link Barry, but I don't understand. How do you post to the sustainability discussion page if there isn't one? I found the 'Green Central' page you sent, but it looks like a single thread. I’ll post this there too, I guess.
As to how to redirect our dollars, the choices will become more clear when we begin to think in terms of $'s=CO2. There are some obvious exceptions though. When an artist signs a piece of work it's $value increases dramatically without any energy input. The opposite is true for energy intense products. The trick is to factor those exceptions to the average CO2 content in.
To do the math turns out to be like doing your taxes... i.e. not real hard once you have the numbers to plug in but a nuisance. Collecting the numbers, though, can be a real hassle. So the best part of this whole system measurement method? When it's really a hassle to collect the detailed CO2 numbers is when using the easy to calculate average CO2 content is probably going to be more accurate.
Looking at the real CO2 contribution of the whole process of delivering your goods and services includes so many things we've all been leaving out it'll take a little getting used to. My method gives an estimate about 50 times as high as the http://buildcarbonneutral.org/ estimate, for example. That's because my approach is all inclusive, treating both the life cycle building costs and the operating costs.
http://www.synapse9.com/design/TBalanceInventory.xls for the template and http://www.synapse9.com/design/ for other stuff
The worst part (which is also where the totally taboo trap door is located) is in the CO2 contribution of the money you don't spend, that you just leave alone to multiply all bye itself... ;-)
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