Reducing our carbon footprint (Phase Two)
The next big trigger was the release of what is called the IPCC SR15 report in October 2018. This really shocked us into looking at areas we had perhaps been avoiding.
IPCC SR15 report October 2018
Matt, our son, suggested we start by measuring our carbon footprints using an online tool. We did that. It was an eye opener. Over many years we had enjoyed having a ‘practical car’ (4x4) and a ‘beautiful’ sports/fun car. I’ve always been a bit of a petrolhead and loved scouring car magazines and websites so I decided to hunt for ‘the perfect’ car formula. After lots of research, endless spreadsheets, quite a few test drives, and some (temporary) feelings of grief and loss, we ended up with (wait for it)
a practical highly efficient Euro 6 diesel car (enough load space, 70 mpg combined, very clever technology that makes a 2wd almost as good as a 4wd) for longer trips,
and an electric car for everyday/local trips which turns out (to our great surprise) to offer all the fun of a performance sports car.
Job done, albeit in an unexpected way.
Charging our electric car
So we then had to move on flying. My Slow Travel experiences with Brava, and the pleasure of our low carbon emission cars, began in some subtle way to make us think about travel in a different way. Suffice to say that we have decided we will do no more long-haul air travel and instead will concentrate on trying to find interesting places to go that are closer to home. For the moment we plan to limit ourselves to just one European return flight a year and try to do any other travel by car, ferry and train. Time will tell whether we grieve for flying. I think not.
However, we are still burning a lot of oil each year to heat the house. I don’t like the thought of all that personal pollution. So we have just started to look into the possibility of a heat pump. It’s early days. All I can say is that it’s very technical, complicated and possibly very expensive (though we might actually get some grant from the government.). It’s a slow process analysing heat loss data and talking to several different “experts”. We have found we need help on these sorts of decision. They are very technical. But the good news is the way that heat pump technology has advanced so rapidly since we first became aware of its existence ten years or more ago. The same with electric cars, the same with solar and wind, the same with control systems. The pace of innovation is breath taking.
So there you have it. We’ve done our best. We are fortunate in being comfortably off, but we have also taken a view that there are many things that fortunate people like us especially should be doing. After all it is the fortunate who have polluted the most in their lifetimes, so they have a responsibility to take care of more of the clean-up bill. But, as I say in The Carbon Buddy Manual, there are many ways in which everyone, irrespective of their financial resources, can play their part.
Colin Hastings
