My Climate Actions for 2020
“Goals” are for procrastinators. Immediate action is the real thing :)
My current climate footprint appears to be around 5.6 - 5.8 tonnes CO2e per year, according to various “climate calculator” web sites that we have in Sweden, such as WWF’s Klimatkalkylatorn and IVF’s Klimatkontot. This number includes the average citizen’s consumption of government services also, such as schools, healthcare, police, administration, etc.
That is not good, because the footprint needs to go down to something between 1.7 and 2.5, depening on who you ask. My footprint is still better than the average (9-10 tonnes in my country, again, this is inclusive of government consumption).
Here are the things that I’m starting to do from today and on:
Start using showering in cold water. Presumably I will also spend less time (and hence use less water) in the shower with cold water. Based on that my shower nostle seems to consume 8 liters/minute and that district heating is used for all heating in my apartment, I used the calculations from the site “kortspeletklimatet”. My footprint from hot water showers is then 8 mins × 8 liters × 52 weeks × 6 showers/week × 31 °C × 0.004184 MJ × 0.0225 kg CO2/MJ = 58 kg CO2
Reduce the indoor temperature to 17 degrees, from 21.9 °C currently. Because I live in an apartment, this may or may not be possible to do, because I think the incoming air is heated also. But I have turned down the radiators quite a bit, and will adjust until I get the target temparature. To prevent moisture and mold issues, I will leave the bathroom temperature unchanged, so the average reduction will be 4.5 °C. According to WWF’s Klimatkalkylatorn, I can save 0.12 tonnes CO2e per 2 °C temperature reduction, so 0.27 tonnes in total.
Update: This turned out to be not possible, the temperature does simply not go down that much. Also, there is a risk of damaging the pipes if the water is not circulating (they could freeze underneath the apartment, which is bottom floor). So I only made a slight reduction by around 1.0 to 1.5 °C.
Here is a sum of the estimated climate savings:
| Action | Estimated savings/year (tonnes CO2e) |
|---|---|
| Start using showering in cold water | 0.060 |
|
Reduce the indoor temperature by |
|
| Total |
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© Samuel Lidén Borell