The Carbon Footprint for Cruisers, Part 1

Vero Beach Public Library
No LL

Cruisers tend to be a laid back lot. They don't care very much about politics, and certainly don't worry about being politically correct. Nevertheless, as the rest of the world goes crazy over global warming and worries about how to reduce their greenhouse gas emission, some cruisers like myself, can't help being curious about how they stack up among the world's polluters. After all, living full time aboard a sail boat ought to make us rank pretty high, since our transportation is provided "free" by wind power.

I decided to find out what my carbon-footprint was. It didn't take a lot of work. I went to Google and searched for "carbon footprint." It came back with 267,000 hits. Many of the web sites listed include free carbon footprint calculators.

Using these calculators proved to be a bit of a challenge. They primarily consist of multiple choice questions, and the correct answer to most of them for a cruiser would have been "none of the above." Here's an example:

Which housing type best describes your home?

1. Free standing house without running water
2. Free standing house with running water
3. Multi-story apartment building
4. Row house or building with 2-4 housing units
5. Green-design residence

Since "none of the above" was not a choice most often, I had to improvise answers to the questions. I started with estimates of our energy use as follows.

Three years ago, Libby and I sold our house, cars, and all our land-based possessions. We have been cruising on our Westsail 32 ever since. This year, for example, we went from Marathon in the Florida Keys to the Erie Canal in New York, to Montreal on the Saint Lawrence River, and back to Florida. Although we like to say that our transportation is provided by wind power, a lot of that travel on canals, rivers and the Intra Coastal Waterway requires that we make way under power. From my logs, I see that we use about 400 gallons of diesel fuel, 20 gallons of gasoline, and 40 pounds of propane per year. Those, fuels (plus wind) provide us our transportation, electricity, heating, cooling and cooking needs.

We also have a solar panel. We have a portable gasoline generator that we run only when we stay at the same place for a week or more. We spend as few days as possible tied up to slips in marinas using shore power; perhaps 10-15 days per year. Two or three times per year, we rent a car for a day or two.

Our grocery shopping and consumption is about the same as it would be if we lived up on the hard. We almost never buy clothes except those recycled from the Salvation Army store.

Last and most, we took a Thanksgiving trip from Florida to Fairbanks Alaska to spend the holiday at my son's house. That trip accounts for more than 50% of our energy use for the entire year.

Anyhow, I used that basic information and used it to improvise answers to a dozen or so of those carbon footprint calculators. The questions asked at the sites varied a lot. Some of them seem to be more interested in political correctness than scientific objectivity. The answers they gave in absolute units also varied. I was surprised though to see that my projected footprint compared to the average American's footprint was remarkably similar from the different calculators.

Here is the basic result. Our footprint is about 4.8 tons of carbon per year for the two of us, or about 2.4 tons per person per year. Compare that to 20.4 tons for the average American, 11 tons average for industrial nations, 7.5 tons for residents of Sweden, 4 tons global average, and 0.9 tons for residents of Bangladesh. According to Al Gore's friends, the global average must be reduced to 2 tons per person per year if we are to avoid Armageddon.

Continued in part 2