10 Simple Tips to Reduce Your Personal GHG Emissions

Here are some simple options that can help you reduce your Greenhouse Gas Emissions (GHGs) from your everyday life. They cost little or no money, and often these tips will even save you money. Each tip has some details below:

1. Drive slower
2. Carpool, or combine trips
3. Eat less meat
4. Grow your own food
5. Reduce your heat & air conditioning
6. Avoid bottled water
7. Compost
8. Take shorter or lower temperature showers
9. Avoid using the clothes dryer
10. Buy less stuff

Drive slower and carpool

Transportation is one of the largest sources of GHG emissions in Canada and reducing fuel consumption really reduces GHG emissions. 

1 litre of gasoline produces about 2.3kg of CO2 (reference). 

There are several ways to reduce your fuel consumption, such as buying more fuel efficient vehicle like a hybrid, plug-in hybrid or electric vehicle. However that's an expensive option and best to consider when you're in the market to buy a new vehicle.

An easy way to reduce your fuel consumption is to carpool. If 2 people decided to drive to work together, when likely that's about 50% savings! Maybe this can work for a trip for groceries, or off-island for a shopping trip. Talk to your friends and get in a vehicle together - usually this leads to more enjoyable driving as well.

Reducing your speed can usually lead to better fuel economy as well. This is mostly because air friction on your car increases significantly as speeds increase. A rough estimation is that doubling your speed would mean 4 times the air drag. Here's an American article with some statistics, and here is the data translation to metric for Canadians:

Example: Toyota Camry

        @88  km/h              @104 km/h            @120km/h

            =5.8L/100km         =6.7L/100km         =7.9/100km

Basically, if you drive slower you will use less gas to get where you are going - but it will take a little longer. This saves you money as you cover the same distance with less gas!

Keeping proper care of your vehicle will also help you use less fuel too.

Meat and Vegetables

Overall, meat is a common part of our omnivore diet as humans. However, in Canada we more meat than the average in the world, and between 1961 and 2014 meat consumption has more than doubled. Meat is also more energy intensive to produce because it is higher on the food chain. This means that first we grow vegetables/grains, then an animal eats them, and then we can eat the animal. About 90% of energy is lost in this extra step of the food chain. So eating less meat means consuming less energy to produce the food. It is estimated that going one day without eating meat would save about 3.5kg of GHG emissions. Perhaps try one day a month, or one day a week?

If you can grow your own food as well and that saves in a different way. The food production system grows food in one location, transports it to a warehouse, then to a grocery store, and then you buy it and bring it home. Each of those steps consumes energy such as fuel for transportation. Eating local, such as from your own garden or from a local farmer reduces GHG emissions as well.

Home Heating/Cooling

Heating our homes through winter, and cooling in the summer, is a large GHG emissions source. Finding more efficient heat sources such as heat pumps makes a big difference, but simply turning down the thermostat in the winter by 1 or 2 degrees also makes a difference. An estimate states that turning down your heat by 1 degree could save up to 350kg of GHG emissions, and over $100 in energy costs! Just cosy up with a warm sweater and you won't even notice that 1 degree.

Reducing Waste

Reducing how much garbage you produce will help save GHG emissions as well. If less is thrown out for the landfill, then you are likely consuming less, or using reusable items more. Two easy ways to reduce your waste is to avoid bottled water and composting.

Bottled Water is a bit of a scam because there are less health rules around the purity of bottled water than there is with municipal water. Also, the cheap plastic used with bottled water can get into the water you'd be drinking. Overall though, clean water is a human right and you shouldn't have to spend money buying it. If you want to have cleaner water than what comes from your tap, it's better to buy a simple filter like a Brita than use all those disposable plastic bottles to reduce waste and save money too.

We don't consume 100% of the food we buy (eg: coffee grounds), and it is actually a great resource if you take advantage of it. Composting your food waste brings returns for new soil nutrients that can help your garden grow bigger and better food. Sending compost to the landfill is not good either - as the high water content in compost materials leads to leaching of chemicals from the landfill, and increasing pollution in our water systems. Composting is very easy to do and it gives returns every year with a greener garden. In the words of one of our local experts - E.B. "That stuff's like gold!"

Energy Consumption at Home

It's good to turn off your lights when you're not using them, but there are a few appliances around the house that use much more electricity than a light. Our clothes dryers and hot water heaters are two examples of high usage appliances.

Using less hot water reduces your overall energy usage significantly, so shorter showers, or cooler showers help reduce GHG emissions. However, washing your clothes in cold water also works the same way.

The clothes dryer also consumes a lot of energy. Using a clothes line during fair weather is a great option to safe money and reduce GHG gases. A few drying racks indoors through the winter works just as well and ensures you have some humidity in your home through the winter.

Buy Less Stuff

Basically, every time we buy something that is 'new' there has been energy consumed to make it, and GHG emissions released. The less we buy as new the less emissions are released. So some of the obvious options are to buy less stuff if possible. Other great options are to reuse, repair or buy used. A recent trend which is particular bad for the environment is 'Fast Fashion' and should be avoided.  This suggests that if we can buy something that will last longer, it's usually better for the environment, and will save you money in the long run.

This final item our is likely the most powerful to cause change in society. Every time we purchase something we are putting money into the economy to support the products we buy. One lesson we learned from the pandemic is that if people stop buying some products, they will stop being made. So we all could be a little more careful about where spend our money and what parts of the economy we decide to support, and start asking ourselves more often - "Do we really need this thing?"

Thanks for ready this long post. If you're interested, here's a list of 25 things to reduce your GHG emissions.

Is It a Good Time to Start Making Changes?

 We Canadians live well. Of course it does depend on how you look at it.

However, among the ~195 countries of the world Canada is one of the nicest. In this ranking from USA News we are ranked #1 in the world for 'Quality of Life'. Although in this ranking by the World Bank for the Best Countries to Live In - we don't make the top 10. We do have serious work to improve the lives of indigenous people, and other minorities, but all in all, the average person in Canada lives well.

Perhaps this is why so few of us seem to be concerned with making changes to help fight climate change?

However, this decade could be the deciding factor as to what the next few hundreds of years will look like on planet Earth. As Canadians we also have more ability to make changes to our lives to reduce GHG emissions.

To help understand this, consider this graph of GHG Emission Pathways created by Simon Donner of UBC:

This graph was prepared to demonstrate the contrasting climate policies in the 2021 federal election. However the three black lines showing the various scenarios of warming for the Earth are very useful. If we do very little to change our ways with GHG emissions we will end up in the 3˚C scenario (or worse) -  which is the gentle hill going down. If we get very aggressive with GHG emission reductions we might be able to meet these federal plans and we will follow something close to the middle line and have only 2˚C of warming overall. Or if we had reduced emissions drastically in the past two years we could have prevented more warming and followed the steepest of the lines (<1.5˚C of warming.) Here is an article from NASA for information on the difference scenarios of 1.5, 2.0 or 3.0 degrees of warming.

The title of this particular post is about whether it's a good time to make changes to help fight climate change. To really look at this topic, consider the very top of the graph where the lines begin to diverge (magnified below):

There is a grey zone in the red box highlighting the three paths, but the red arrow marks roughly January 2024 - That is about 18 months away at the time of writing this post. So will we be on the path of decreasing GHG emissions significantly (green arrow, to about 600Mt/year, or 17%) by then, or will we have made very little progress and end up following the top line? By the end of 2024 we will likely be able to see which path we are following. 

What Does It Mean to Reduce by 17% by Jan 2024?

This graph is showing the overall emissions for our country, and therefore reducing by 17% is a nationwide goal. One way to interpret this is that every citizen, regardless of age, or job, or living situation reduces their GHG emissions, including in their homes, with their transportation, and in their employment locations. What might this mean? We could all drive 17% less, or buy a vehicle that is 17% more efficient, and reducing our heating by 17%, buy 17% clothes or other material things, and buy food with with 17% less emissions such as local options. Even this goal is complicated for every Canadian to implement.

A more realistic scenario would likely include some people making decisions to reduce more than 17% while others are slower to make the transition. Not everyone has the means to make changes, and not everyone is even interested. The challenge will be to see which of us makes the changes and which don't?

Other possible scenarios involve large scale corporate or government decisions. In this previous post about the sources of GHG emissions in Canada we see that 17% reductions could be achieved by shutting down much of the oil and gas production in Canada. However, that would not be fair to those industries unless we can provide a Just Transition for the companies and their employees who would need to find new, more sustainable, jobs.

Summary

We don't know what will happen in the future, but examining this one graph should tell you that our fates will be decided in the next 8 years, and that we need to start making decisions in the years of 2022 and 2023 to begin the shift to changing our emissions. The economy is slow to change, but we as consumers have the power to make it happen by being careful with the spending decisions we make. We need to keep the overall warming of our atmosphere below 2.0˚C if possible, and we need to make decisions starting now.

Here is a video from the Economist about what a world of 3.0 degrees of warming could bring.