Reply to do you know anyone in this affluent area that has altered their lifestyle to reduce CO2 emissions?

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[quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous]In North Arlington, my wife and I feel like we are completely alone in our efforts to reduce CO2 emissions. We have just one car that we use sparingly, and we use bicycles for our local errands. We keep our thermostat at 65F in the winter (and wear sweaters) and 79F in the summer, using ceiling fans to make the bedrooms more comfortable. [b]We greatly limit our international and domestic travel[/b]. We eat mostly vegetarian meals, and we never eat beef.

All of our neighbors have multiple large SUVs, and many neighbors have knocked their 2000 square foot houses down and replaced them with 5000 square foot homes. Some neighbors with 5000 square foot homes have only 1 child, so they don't truly need a huge living space. Many neighbors drive to work in their SUV without any other passengers to accompany them. They go on multiple international vacations a year (lots of CO2 per flight). Huge amounts of garbage are generated each week and placed on the curb, presumably to make way for yet more stuff that they are buying for their homes -- stuff that will probably end up on the curbside, destined for the landfill, a year or two down the road.

I've posted my frustrations in the "car and transport" section of this forum, only to be told by other posters that I'm jealous of my neighbor's SUVs and large homes. Despite a high level of education among DCUM posters, most don't appear concerned about the consequences of their consumerism, and can't even conceive of a high-income family exercising some restraint.

We are, in fact, a high net worth family, but we are striving to reduce our carbon footprint. We feel completely alone, like strangers in a foreign country. I'm curious if anybody else here feels the same way.

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OP, you are taking so many positive steps and should be applauded for them but until you do more than just "limit" your domestic and internatinal air travel (esp the international) you are doing far more harm to the environment than all the good you are doing put together. It is just the facts. [/quote]

And this is the thing that is so annoying about posts like the OP.

OP's family has decided that they'll limit but not give up travel, including flights.  They live in a SFH in North Arlington, even though they have just one kid.  I'm sure there are other things that aren't mentioned that aren't the environmental ideal.  So, OP has drawn a line for things that he (assuming here) and his family will do, and won't do.  That's fine, and something everyone should do.  But then he writes this passive aggressive screed ("I feel so alone in my fight against climate change!  Where are all the other like minded souls?  Woe is me!") that is, when you get down to it, just criticizing others for drawing that line in a different place than he did.  Anything less than his efforts are insufficient, and shows that others just don't care.  But there's no recognition that the line that *he* drew is completely arbitrary, and there are tradeoffs that he has refused to make because they are necessary, or would make his life too uncomfortable.  He's fine with his choices, but other choices are bad!

Short version, OP is a passive aggressive, sanctimonious hypocrite, but the most irritating thing about him is the complete lack of self-awareness.  [/quote]

OP here. A couple of responses to your post. First, I haven't taken a flight for a vacation in 5 years. Prior to that, I flew a great deal, but I altered my habits after calculating my CO2 footprint and waking up to the consequences of my behavior. Second, my wife has an elderly parent in another country. She visits her mother once every 2 to 3 years. That is the total extent of my family's air travels. Nothing else. Our airline CO2 amounts to about 10% of our household's annual emissions.

In regard to our single family home -- if we sell this home (where we have lived for 10 years), the lot will be used to build a McMansion. So selling the house won't lower CO2 emissions, but rather increase them. Second, our average monthly power consumption is about 375 KWH, or 12KWH per day. This is about the same level of consumption that we had when we lived in a condo 15 years ago. Our monthly gas consumption is about 50 therms. As far as I can tell, this is quite low. We achieve these low numbers by being extremely conservative with heating and cooling, and we don't have a large screen TV (in fact, we don't have a TV at all).

We have compared our household's per capita CO2 emissions against various metrics. This past year, our per capita emissions were about one-third of the national average. Of course, even this isn't good enough -- net zero will require even deeper cuts.

I think "self-awareness" on this issue involves (1) calculating your CO2 footprint, (2) comparing it to various benchmarks to develop a sense of how your emissions stack up to the emissions of others, (3) figuring out what you can do to push your CO2 emissions down, and (4) implementing your emissions cuts. We have gone through this process, leading to large reduction in our footprint. 
[/quote]

Like I said, you have drawn a line based on what is comfortable for you.  Great.

Please spare us the rationalizations about the house.  All of your posts (even this one) are all about your own personal CO2 footprint, and how you can push that down.  But suddenly, with respect to the house, it isn't about your own personal output anymore, but what happens to the house *after* you sell it, when it is definitionally not about your own output, but someone else's.  It's now about the aggregate effect.  It's a convenient shift in the analytical framework that gets you to the result you want.  Also, if you were *really* serious, you could sell the house to someone who won't tear it down, even going so far as to use restrictive covenants to ensure that.  You won't do that, of course, because it's a significant monetary hit.  (And to be clear, I'm not suggesting you should do that - I'm just demonstrating that your "it would be counterproductive to sell the house" is both analytically flawed and incorrect - it's just too much of a burden for you to contemplate.)

At the end of the day, you are acting in a way that makes you feel good.  That is, as I posted earlier, very important.  And you've received a bunch of plaudits from anonymous strangers, which no doubt makes you feel good too.  So congrats, I guess.  [/quote]

OP here. For the record, we don't feel good about our CO2 situation. I'd like to emit zero CO2, and I feel guilty knowing that I don't, and that the CO2 I've emitted will remain in the atmosphere for hundreds of years.

In regard to selling the house to somebody who won't tear it down -- please explain to me what that would accomplish, assuming I could find such a buyer? Would the nation's aggregate CO2 emissions go down as a result? How?

I'm trying to understand your logic. Are you assuming that the new buyer would use the heating/AC even more sparingly than what we are already doing? I think that is highly unlikely.

[/quote]

Good grief.  At the risk of further encouraging this nonsense, your focus has been your family's CO2 output.  What happens with the house is irrelevant.  You could move to a condo or apartment and reduce, even if only slightly, your output even further.

But I think we've finally hit on the issue.  It's this:

[quote]For the record, we don't feel good about our CO2 situation. I'd like to emit zero CO2, and I feel guilty knowing that I don't, and that the CO2 I've emitted will remain in the atmosphere for hundreds of years. [/quote]

This is a peculiar blend of narcissism and anxiety, where you have centered yourself in a global crisis and let it drive your actions, to the point of feeling guilt for actions the impact of which any rational person will tell you are so infinitesimally small that they don't deserve any thought.

I have been pretty snarky with you up till this point, but all that aside, I mean sincerely that you might benefit from some therapy to address this anxiety.  [/quote]

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