Emissions from municipal services such as road maintenance are included as part of indirect emissions © Greenpeace/Steve Morgan
In my last post about carbon calculators, the tricky question of indirect emissions came up. I'm putting my own life through various calculators and seeing how they compare, but in trying to log my daily activities that consume energy and resources there are a number of unknowables.
The swimming pool I go to, for instance, will use large amounts of energy. You could argue that I'm creating a demand by going there, and if there was no demand the pool wouldn't be there. On the other hand, you could argue that the leisure centre will be open and the pool heated whether I go there or not. Either way, those greenhouse gas emissions need to be accounted for.
The same goes for anything I use or consume: if I boil a kettle, I'm only directly responsible for the electricity used for those few minutes, but there's also the energy used to produce the plastics, mine the metals, manufacture the kettle and transport it to the shop I bought it from. Am I not also partly responsible for those? Then there are all the municipal services provided by the government or councils, such as schools, hospitals, road maintenance and even (oh hell) the military. All of these generate emissions, and the fairest way is to divide them up between everyone in the country.
Some carbon calculators take these into account: for instance, the mobile carbon calculator from C-Change, an online version of which is available at the Centre for Alternative Technology's Carbon Gym. My share of indirect emissions for the last 12 months comes out at 0.95 tonnes. It also give an indication of my infrastructure share (1.7 tonnes), which is a fixed proportion of municipal emissions.
It estimates my overall emissions at 11.04 tonnes, slightly over the UK average of around 10 tonnes. That's down to a long-haul flight I took last year - remove that, and my total plummets to just 5.32 tonnes. It also provides the global average for comparison (6 tonnes) and the so-called 'fair share', or what my emissions should be to keep climate change in check: two tonnes. That represents a cut of 80 per cent for the average UK citizen and even if I don't fly again, I'd still have to bring mine down by over 50 per cent.
The problem is I don't have any control over those two-plus tonnes of indirect emissions. They're in the hands of the government: it's ministers who can set the policies to force everyone else - government departments, local councils, and especially companies and industry - to bring down their emissions. But if we're heading for an era that includes new coal-fired power stations, how is that going to be possible?
Meanwhile, I've been trundling along with the mobGAS application on my phone which, sadly, doesn't include indirect emissions. The project hit a bump when I entered some figures incorrectly, and it thought I'd been responsible for 200kg of food waste, not 200g. And I wondered why my methane contributions had rocketed.
My daily emissions are hovering around 7kg of CO2 a day, which is way below the UK average of 25.6kg, but then have I been as thorough as I could have been? Definitely not. For example, I haven't been logging each and every light bulb I've used. More significantly though, apart from food I haven't been entering quantities of other waste types, such as glass and metals. Try as I did, I haven't quite come around to weighing the contents of my recycling box.
And while this calculator is wide-ranging, it isn't comprehensive. There's nowhere to enter the amount of rubbish that gets picked up by the bin men; neither is there an option to enter the length of time the central heating is on which would surely have a large impact on emissions. Still, I'm thinking even more about my personal contribution to climate change - I just wish someone would do the thinking for me.
