Where Are Your Emissions? The Big Picture in the Bay

<-- All the carbon pollution we pay for in the San Francisco Bay Area including Alameda, Contra Costa, Marin, Napa, San Francisco, San Mateo, Santa Clara, Solano and Sonoma Counties.

[click on image for larger version]

"Consumption-based emissions" just means that instead of trying to figure out exactly how much emissions are released in the Bay Area, we're counting all the emissions to produce things consumed by all of Bay Areans.

I think consumption-based tracking makes the most sense since we can't control who happens to drive through our territory but we have can (mostly) control our own purchasing and travel behavior

I felt compelled to post this graph after hearing about a California official who was actually quite knowledgeable about consumption based footprints guesstimate that "about 50%" of our consumption footprint was from electricity. As you can see, it's actually about 6% (Res[idential] electricity).

It's no surprise whatsoever, as residential energy efficiency is often the only thing we hear about and represents a billion-dollar industry in California--which is great! Don't get me wrong; it's great to be energy efficient, but it's also great to focus on the category where we can have the most meaningful impact. Around here that's transportation.

Basically, if you don't have a car in California you're pretty much one of the greenest people in the United Sates. Kudos, environmentalist!

I love that people are starting to ask me "What's the one best thing I can do?" and I wish I could pull this chart out of my pocket because then I could show them that reducing gas use by 1/4 is the same as going COMPLETELY off-grid for electricity. Amazing.

Now we have all this buzz and awareness happening around carbon footprint reductions, it's important that our enthusiasm and effort goes in the right direction and that it goes by foot, bike, and bus.

Source: All data is from the excel spreadsheet version of UC Berkeleys' CoolClimate Carbon calculator. See a (somewhat outdated) data page here: coolclimate.berkeley.edu/documentation

Note: "Vehicle mfg" = vehicle manufacturing