Reduce Your Carbon Footprint

How to Reduce Your Carbon Footprint and Possibly Save the Planet

Julian Darley is working on a vision. It’s a vision of how our increasingly globalized lifestyles could transition as our blue-green (and evermore brown) planet becomes less and less able to cough up the fossil fuel we require to run worldwide commerce and trade.

Surprise: this vision of the post-carbon world is a positive one.

Some observers paint an ominous picture of an oil-scarce future dominated by international conflicts over dwindling fuel stocks. “We are entering a period of potentially great instability, turbulence and hardship,” writes James Howard Kuntsler in his 2006 book The Long Emergency. Immediately, images come to mind from cult movies like Mel Gibson’s Mad Max, Road Warrior and Beyond Thunderdome.

Darley’s vision, however, isn’t so apocalyptic. We may lose things we’re accustomed to, like being able to afford to commute to work, to fly or drive on a vacation, or to eat anything that has to be trucked in from another town, but we could gain peace of mind. Many of the pieces are already in place. Don’t you yearn for a world where you don’t spend a good part of your day commuting to and from work; where you know your neighbors and trade goods and services with them; and where you purchase great tasting, locally grown food at your local farmers’ market? Add to that becoming energy independent by supplying locally — through solar, wind and other renewable energy sources — more energy than your house and your town use, and you’ve got an idea of how Darley thinks we can make our footprint lighter, make it possible for humans to continue to live on the planet, and even have quality in that life.

Darley, the president and founder of the Sebastapol, California-based Post Carbon Institute — a think tank devoted to addressing the issues of global warming and fossil fuel scarcity — has coined the term “relocalization” to describe his vision.

“Relocalization is a community-level attempt to prepare for the decline in oil, gas and coal by reducing consumption and producing as much of our vital needs as locally as possible,” Darley explains. “Once you become obsessed with producing locally, your energy footprint should diminish dramatically.”

One of those vital needs clearly is energy. Increasing our use of clean energy, producing as much of it as we can locally, and cutting our consumption drastically — between 80 and 90 percent, many experts recommend — is critical. Only then will we be able to both cope with fossil fuel scarcity and mitigate (as much as possible) global climate change. That clean energy, Darley argues, will come primarily from renewable sources, such as solar and wind energy, but it may also come from ocean waves and tides and biomass.

“We need every renewable energy source, with the possible exception of nuclear,” says Michael Brownlee, co-founder of Boulder Valley Relocalization, in Boulder, Colorado.

Right now, much of the conventional thinking about how to incorporate renewables into the energy grid focuses on mega projects: Imagine thousands of acres filled with huge arrays of solar collectors that produce enough energy to power a small city. There already are solar arrays of that size in France and Germany.

But, for relocalization proponents like Jason Bradford, Ph.D., founder of the nonprofit Willits Economic Localization (WELL) in Willits, California, huge arrays are problematic. As the leader of an organization devoted to creating a self-sufficient, sustainable local economy in Willits, Bradford says these non-local arrays mimic our current energy distribution strategy of large power plants situated many miles away from the cities they power. “There is a huge loss of distribution along those lines,” he says. “There needs to be local infrastructure for local use. There need to be micro and regional grids.”

Darley agrees. “The emphasis should be on the community level,” he says. For example, he envisions communities with solar panels not only on home rooftops but also on factory roofs. Excess power produced from these panels then flows back into a local grid, rather than a statewide or multistate grid.

Large centralized power production was necessary when we had toxic energy production methods, but now we can envision local, municipal and neighborhood PV farms. It’s like we’re looking at PV community gardens instead of PV factory farms. Of course, the immediate opportunity is even more local — PV on the roofs of our homes. It’s the most local end of the energy production perspective. Present day grid-tied solar technology optimizes roof space, minimizes distribution losses, and the energy we put back into the grid is used locally, moving us toward Darley’s vision.

According to Bradford, one U.S. city has already pledged to localize its energy production. San Francisco’s Board of Supervisors recently resolved that the city will break with mega utility Pacific Gas and Electric (PG&E) and create its own municipal utility that will invest in renewable energy sources.

In addition to solar, if the right technology can be developed, there is great promise in smallscale wind power. Just as the thousand-acre solar array concept doesn’t neatly fit with Darley’s vision, in a relocalized economy we wouldn’t generate wind power solely from those huge, horizontal- axis turbines you see gathered together on so-called wind farms. Those turbines, which work the same way axles work to turn car wheels, need what Darley calls high-quality wind. “And I never tire of saying ‘who wants to live in highquality wind areas,’” he quips. Turbines designed to generate wind power within or close to communities where people want to live are the ticket, Darley says.

The same principle goes for biofuels like ethanol, Darley points out. Again, the current thinking about how to manufacture biofuels is that the raw material, like corn and cow manure, can be imported long distances to manufacturing plants located hundreds or thousands of miles away from where the fuel will be used. Boulder Valley Relocalization’s Brownlee cites the example of two large corn ethanol plants in Yuma, Colorado, on the state’s far eastern rural edge. “The raw materials are coming from Iowa and Texas,” he says. And importing those raw materials requires energy, so it turns out that making biofuels in this manner actually uses more energy than it creates. On the other hand, Darley says, “if you can grow your biofuels locally, and you don’t use very much, then you are sustainable; you’re using less than nature will give you.”

The ultimate challenge in relocalizing, says Brownlee, is that it’s never been done before. “We really don’t know how to do it,” he says.

But that doesn’t mean it can’t be done. And Darley’s convinced that life with much less oil, gas and coal won’t revert to the way life was before the era of abundant fossil fuel. “It won’t look like old London or old Rome,” he says. But it might just have components of both. Like lively street markets and the ability to trade with people you know. And it most definitely will include planet-saving power generated from clean renewable energy.

“Actually, I think we’ll all be much better off,” Darley says.