Cali Cars and CO2

OK I'm back from the west coast where we visited friends, family and the desert. My laptop has been resurrected and NO MORE RERUNS, I promise. Also I've seen that trackback spam has evolved (well perhaps intelligently evolved is closer to the truth).

Northern California was great (although in the past few weeks a bit wet). If I had sum up southern California in a word it would be "car", but in reality L.A. is quite elusive and massive. After parading around LA for a couple of days we saw a great documentary at the Egyptian, called L.A. Plays Itself. It's a tad on the long side, but for anyone who lives in the area, or is interested in how art and history interact to invoke a certain view point of a city as complex as Los Angeles, it's worth a look.

Speaking of cars, the weather etc., check out this Carbon Footprint quiz over at WIRED. How many pounds of CO2 do I release every year?

My total is about 17000-18000 pounds. That's pretty good according to their scale.

My total is low because,
1) I live in an apartment building. In general apartment buildings are much more fuel efficient that houses due to the fact that the surface/volume ratio is lower, resulting in less heat loss in the winter and less heat gain in the summer (i.e. lower energy consumption for heating and AC). I must say that our building is old (built in 1872) and is not as well insulated as more modern apartment buildings. This may raise my real numbers.
2) I have no car and use public transport. This is the major reason my CO2 numbers are so low.
3) We use the bus to travel to NYC and Montreal. Just like public transport, Greyhound and the Chinatown express are also quite fuel efficient. A major use of CO2 is air travel. I take about 2 transcontinental flights a year, my wife less. This is a major chunk of our CO2 emission. This year we may take 3 flights raising each of our totals by ~6000 pounds.

According to the WIRED scale, I'm almost Deep Green. So basically living in a crowded city is generally greener than living in a car city such as LA. I've actually heard this argument before in David Korten's provocative book, When Corporations rule the World.

One way I could improve my CO2 numbers, is to buy more local produce. I didn't know this but a big chunk of our energy consumption goes into the transport of goods such as food. A second way would be to travel less, as in fewer air flights - that would be hard. A third way would be to move to a modern apartment building.

I better end it here. Pics of Cali will follow soon.