Change of the Week: The Riot 4 Austerity 90% Reduction Project
I sit in my living room and I look at a set of Thomas’ nesting/stacking blocks sitting on the shelf. The largest block depicts a polar bear. I wonder what my answer will be when Thomas is old enough to ask me where polar bears live. Will I reply, “On ice floes in the Arctic.” Or will I reply, “In zoos. There are none left in the wild because the ice where they used to live is gone.”
I listen to the news and hear stories of cyclones and flooding in Myanmar. Thousands upon thousands of people are dead, millions are homeless, and countless numbers of children are left parentless. The news reports that aid agencies are looking for nursing mothers in Myanmar to take in orphaned infants to feed them and care for them as their own. I think about how these families, both those whose parents have left orphans and those who are taking in orphaned children, aren’t so different from my family. We were simply born into very different circumstances. I wonder if such a catastrophic natural disaster struck here would there be someone to feed my baby?
I walk past the gas station nearest our house and note that premium gasoline is now $4.99 per gallon. There are already over one hundred thousand American men and women in the Middle East mired in a seemingly endless struggle, primarily over access to oil. I wonder how the conflict will end and where the next conflict will be?
The world sits upon a precarious tipping point. Behind us lies an era of cheap and abundant oil, environmental devastation, and unprecedented population and economic growth. The future is, for this brief moment, still unwritten. What we do in the next decade will determine if we will continue to live on a planet that looks like the planet that humanity evolved on. We will soon reach a point of no return in which humanity has put so much carbon dioxide into the Earth’s atmosphere that global warming will cause irreversible consequences. Those consequences include melting of the Artic ice cap, disintegration of the polar ice sheets and a rise in sea level, shifting climate zones, and acidification of the oceans.
I don’t want that future for myself, for my children, or for my planet. To avoid this catastrophe the U.S. must cut its emissions of carbon dioxide (i.e., its “carbon footprint”) by 90%. Reducing our impact to just 10% of what we currently use will, by no means, be easy. I am, at heart, an idealist. I recently saw a story on CNN profiling an American mother who refused to stop driving her SUV for fear that she would be seen as a “soccer mom” if she drove a more energy efficient vehicle. I was really disappointed with the mother, but I know that no one has probably ever bothered to explain to her what impact her SUV is really having. I’ll bet that she cares deeply about her children and by extension the world that she is leaving to them. I believe that most people would care if they were told what the problems are and how they are the critical part of the solution. Our government certainly isn’t informing them. Rather, our leaders send out tax rebates encouraging Americans to buy more consumer goods or suggest a temporary reprieve of the federal gasoline tax encouraging Americans to drive more. Many Americans are starting see the disconnect between what our government is telling them and what they are seeing with their own eyes. They are asking: What is going on? How does this affect me and my family? What are the consequences of my choices? What do I need to change? How much do I need to change? How can I change?
For the past year or so a group of people have set out to answer those questions and to show that dramatic reductions in our environmental impact are possible. The name of the that project is The Riot for Austerity. As of today we are joining the “Riot”. Much like a person who needs to lose weight, this is a permanent lifestyle change. One can’t maintain a healthily physique by eating salads and running every day for a year only to go back to sitting on the couch and eating burgers after they have lost 50 pounds. By the same token, we are going to try to reduce our impact by 90% and then keep it there. We may not reach our goal, but we want to demonstrate what is possible for a typical urban family such as ourselves and to highlight those areas that would benefit from government investment and support (e.g., public transportation).
The organizers of the Riot have divided environmental impacts into seven categories and calculated what each of us needs to do in each of these categories to reduce our impact by 90%. A short summary of our goals is outlined below. More details are available on the Riot website.
Gasoline: The average American uses 500 gallons of gasoline (including diesel) per year. A 90% reduction or 10% of that is 50 gallons per year per person. There is no credit given for using ethanol or biodiesel as, in general, both of these sources actually take more oil to produce than they replace.
- Electricity: The average American household uses 11,000 kWh per year. 10% is 1100 kWh per household per year. If you use solar energy you get a factor of 2 bonus, i.e., you could use 2200 kWh per year. If you use wind and/or hydroelectric energy you get a factor of 4 bonus, i.e., you could use 4400 kWh per year.
- Heating and Cooking Energy: This is further subdivided into natural gas/propane, wood, and heating oil. For our household, this primarily means natural gas with potentially a bit of wood. The average U.S. natural gas usage per household is 1000 therms per year. A 90% reduction gives you 100 therms per household per year.
- Garbage: The average American generates about 4.5 lbs of garbage per person per day.. 10% of that is 0.45 lbs per person per day.
- Water: The average American uses 100 gallons of water per person per day.. A 90% reduction gives you 10 gallons per person per day. I already know that this number is going to be unattainable for us given the fact that we are growing our food in a desert.
- Consumer Goods: A professor at Syracuse University calculates that as an average, every consumer dollar we spend puts 0.5 lbs of carbon into the atmosphere. The average American household spends $10,000 per year on consumer goods. This does not include your rent/mortgage, healthcare, car payments, insurance, etc. This does include things like gifts, toys, music, books, tools, household goods, cosmetics, toiletries, and paper goods. 90% means a reduction to $1,000 dollars per household per year. Think about what good you could do for yourself and for others with that extra $9000 (or more) a year.
- Food: The organizers of the riot state that is was “by far the hardest thing to come up with a simple metric for.” They divide food into 3 categories:
- Food you grow, or which is produced locally and organically. Examples include the tomatoes you grow in your backyard, the honey that you purchase at the farmer’s market, or the locally produced goat cheese. This should be 70% of your food purchases.
- Dry, bulk goods transported from longer distances. Examples include whole unprocessed beans, grains, and tea, coffee, and spices (fair trade and sustainably grown). This should be no more than 25% of your food purchases.
- Wet goods, conventionally grown meat, fruits, vegetables, juices, oils, and milk transported long distances, and processed foods like chips and soda. This should comprise no more than 5% of your food purchases.
Over the coming weeks, I’ll be posting details of how we are doing in each of these seven categories along with suggestions for what we have done and found useful.
Even prior to officially starting this project we have made a number of choices and changes towards a lower impact life. Some, such as using and washing cloth diapers, have proven to be surprisingly easy. Others, such as growing our own produce have been much more challenging. As difficult as this lifestyle might seem; so far we have found that the vast majority of choices have given us more independence, with more money to save, and more time to spend together as a family. It is abundantly clear to us that like money, burning carbon, does not buy happiness.