What's Your Carbon Footprint?

What is CFP or your Carbon Foootprint in the first place? Answer can be read in http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Carbon_footprint.

It is said that if your household's monthly KwH electric consumption is 100, your CFP (carbon footprint) is 169.2 Lbs. And if you consume 40 Liters of Gasoline for travel-use alone in your private fossil fuel based car every Month, you are said to have a CFP of roughly 157 Lbs.  Aggregate that with each member of the household that drives their own fossil-fuel based car.

And if your kitchen and heating systems burns 11 Kgs or 3.68 Gallons or 4.6 Therms, will translate to a CFP of 55 Lbs. per Month.

Thus, the sum of your direct and primary monthly CFP or GHG (Green House Gas emmission) is

Household Electric CFP + 

        Household Gas for Cooking and Heating CFP +

        Fossil-fuel based vehicle CFP * N independently driven Vehicles

Assume that the household uses only one car for work and weekly travels, 100kWH per month Electric consumption, 11 kG of Gas per month, this household's direct and primary CFP is estimated at 157 + 169 + 55 = 381 Lbs./Mo. or 12.7 Lbs or 5.8 kG per Day or 2 tons per Year.

Carbon Footprint formula:

• Electric, 1.692 Lb per kWH
• Gas, 11.9 Lb per Therm

The 2 tons per Year is consistent and typical to an individual living in a Third World country like the Philippines (PH) whose annual per capita is just over $10,000 but less than $20,000.  That's half of the Global average of 4 tons per Year according to this.  In the First World country like the US and Australia, it can sky rocket to as much as 20 tons, 14 to 15 in Canada, and 9 to 10 in Russia, UK, Germany and Japan.

No matter who or where you are, if you are in a socio-economic strata whose GDP is categorized as from the first world, which means you are affluent enough to afford travel and live anywhere in the World and practice its expensive and potentially wasteful lifestyle, it is highly plausible that your CFP is around 10 to 20 tons, generally speaking.  

This doesn't mean however that we at the lower socio-economic class are absolved from the responsibility of bringing our GHG emission down.  We can all do our share and be together in this by targetting to lower our individual CFP by 20 to 50%.  

If we now have your undivided attention, the very first thing first that you must do is to calculate, like we did above, your CFP.

Now that you have your CFP, the next best thing you need to do is to ask the basic question, WIIFM?

Whether you are producing 2 or 20 tons GHG every year, you are contributing to the speedy destruction of our one and only planet.  The sum of our irresponsibility will cause killer heat waves, typhoons and flooding of our archipelagic mega-cities, just to enumerate the top 3.

So think for a moment and answer the question, how do I bring my CFP down to 20 or even 50%?

The answers to this question is to consider, Car pooling or challenge yourselves to using a motorcycle wisely and use of Renewable Energy for your electric, cooking and heating needs.  The cleanest and greenest RE sources are those that comes from the Sun, Wind and Methane from organic waste matter.  

The fastest and easiest way to adopt RE is to use a Solar powered generator route. How much money is needed to achieve 50% savings from your 100kWH Electric Bill?  The Green Leaf approach is betting its just $1200 tops for a pay-back period of approximately 5 years.  The slash will in effect reduce around 70 Lbs of your CFP or effectively 20% reduction.  

For a customized calculation of your needs, contact andres.goodface@gmail.com.