Step 3: Change Your Lifestyle For an 80% Reduction.

Getting to an 80% reduction in energy usage will require significant lifestyle changes for most people.  But if the environment is important to you, the changes are possible, especially when you consider implementing them over a twenty year period instead of trying to do them all at once.

In order to reduce your home heating and cooling emissions to 1000 kg of CO2 per year, you will have to forgo air conditioning and implement one of the following options:

• Use geothermal or wood to heat your home
• Downsize to an energy efficient home half the size of your current home (about 70 square meters for an average Canadian family)
• Build a new passive solar home to net-zero standards (that does not require you to commute to work)

By investing in Bullfrog Power or renewable energy, your electricity greenhouse gas emissions are reduced to zero, but it is important to keep you energy demands low by not using your clothes dryer and minimizing your use of electric devices like hair dryers, irons, hand mixers, etc.  Shift your appliance usage (like dishwashers and clothes washers) to evenings and weekends to help reduce the peak demand on the electrical grid.

Driving a hybrid car 8000 km per year generates about 1100 kg of CO2.  This means you will have to move your work closer to home or your home closer to work so that you can walk or bike instead of driving or taking the bus.  Time the move for when it makes sense to you for example when you are changing jobs or retiring.  You will also  probably have to cut your leisure driving in half in order to reduce your driving to 8000 km per year.

By living on a mostly vegetarian, local and organic diet, the average household can reduce their greenhouse gas emissions to about 600 kg of CO2 per year.  Convert your yard into a bio-intensive organic garden so you can grow most of your own vegetables.  It is reasonable to get dried goods from overseas (like tea, coffee, spices), but not fresh produce or liquids (like wine and olive oil) that are less efficient to transport.

Reducing other areas of consumption to 2700 kg of CO2 per year means no flying for work or pleasure.  It also means replacing gas powered lawn mowers and snow blowers with electric or manual models.  You will need to stop using gas powered recreational vehicles like motor boats, snowmobiles, ATVs, etc and replace them with sailing, canoeing, skiing, biking and walking.  Instead of eating out and staying in hotels on vacation, you will need to stay with friends and family or camp.  In general, we will have to buy about one quarter of the things we do today and have almost no garbage.

My wife and I have both changed our jobs in the last few years so that we can walk to work.  We have a small garden and eat local, organic, vegetarian food as much as possible.  We still travel and drive more than we should, but plan to reduce these in the future by taking more local trips.  These lifestyle changes mean we walk more, eat better and have less stress.

Next Conclusion

Back to Step 2: Invest in energy efficiency to cut your usage in half.

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