Carbon Emissions

From time to time I get an e-mail alert from Jim Hansen, as happened today, regarding his recent trip to New Zealand.

On page 3 of his reflections, Jim Hansen shows fossil fuel carbon emissions for 4 countries, Sweden, Denmark, Norway and New Zealand. The reason I mention this is that national carbon emissions can be reduced. Sweden's emissions peaked around 1970 and declined from 25Mt/y to 15Mt/y in 2010; Denmark's are on a downward slope and Norway's seem to be declining for the last 3 years.

How is Canada doing? Our carbon emissions seem to have peaked in 2007 at 750Mt/y, as they are 2% lower in 2008, according to Environment Canada.

Could we do better and save money? I think we could.

The combined greenhouse gas emissions from automobiles and light duty gasoline trucks were 85.4 million tons for 2008, representing 11.6% of the national total. That means we burned about 35.5 billion liters of gasoline that year in cars, SUVs and pick up trucks that year.

From my experience with an 8-cylinder GMC Sierra, a VW TDI and Passat 2.0T, I have a fair notion of actual fuel consumption. On my way to town my GMC uses about twice what the Passat used and the TDI uses about 25% less than the Passat did on the highway. By shifting from the Passat to the TDI I reduced my emissions significantly without a penalty on driving comfort; actually it's more comfortable in the TDI than in the Sierra.

For simplicity, using a gasoline price of $ 1.00/liter, then Canadians paid $ 35.5 billion for gasoline in 2008. With a shift from SUVs, trucks and vans to cars, we can reduce our fuel consumption by at least 5-10%, which equates to reducing our fuel expenses by between $ 1.75 billion to $ 3.55 billion a year! With gasoline prices going up, the savings today are 25%+ higher, well ahead of inflation.

Maybe the environmental argument is too abstract, the potential fuel cost savings make a pretty good argument.