Case study 2: Fresno, California.

Start with a carbon budget of 3000 lbs of carbon per person per year. 1000 lbs is taken up by unavoidable supply chain stuff for food, clothes, etc. just to survive, assuming they mostly buy local food. Now we have 2000 lbs of carbon to use as we wish. Can we make this work?!?

Fresno is located in the heart of California’s San Joaquin Valley and is next door neighbors/smushed together with Clovis. Fresno has 114 square miles of land in the city limits and about half a million residents. Clovis covers 24 square miles and has about 100,000 residents. Fresno is only hours away from both Yosemite National Park and the Pacific Ocean. Fresno is a poor town, with low average incomes of $19,226 per person compared to the US average of $31,786. The climate is both challenging and ideal for agriculture – many tropical and subtropical crops are grown in the San Joaquin Valley due to the rarity of freezing weather. The Valley actually produces about 12% of America’s entire food supply! Summer time is long and hot, with rain extremely rare from June through beginning of October. Fresno averages less than 12 inches of rainfall a year, so water supply from the mountains is a big issue, with constant demand for more from the farmers. The long sunny days leads to big yields as long as adequate water is available. Unfortunately, the chemical fertilizers that have been used for decades contain a lot of salt, which is building up in and degrading the soil. https://www.californiasun.co/stories/californias-soil-is-getting-too-salty-for-crops-to-grow/ San Joaquin farmers need to turn to regenerative agriculture techniques to keep their land in production. They also need the State to allow more water storage ponds to be built so as to capture rainwater – I recommend California create some dedicated pond/lake specialists who can help farmers with this, while making sure that environmental impacts are good ones, not bad.

OK, on to the project!

Currently either 20,000 or 40,000 out of 500,000 people use the bus system every day in Fresno, depending on if the system counts each ticket as a separate rider, when riders often ride round trip. We want to have 400,000 people use it for most of their transportation needs because the carbon savings are enormous, not to mention the benefits to air quality, savings on raw materials like steel and plastic to make new cars, peaceful unclogged roads, etc.

We will assume the bus expansion plan is followed so that there is plenty of seating and shade at each stop. The buses are all comfortably air-conditioned or heated depending on time of year, they have free wifi, they are usually about three quarters full so you are not cramped, and you spend $48 a month for unlimited rides.

During the fierce 110+ degree (Fahrenheit, or 43+ degrees Celsius) heat of a Fresno summer you are still dealing with about the same amount of heat as you would with a car, because you would have to cross parking lots anyway to get to your car, you are not opening a boiling car and waiting for it to cool off (the bus is instantly cool), and the bus stops will be very close to your house so that you don’t wilt by the time you get to work.

Fresnans are lucky in some ways – the average commute length in the US is 12.8 miles, but they average only 5.6 miles for their commutes AND their city is very flat and mostly laid out in grid form, which is ideal for both bicycling and mass transit.

Let’s assume they walk about a quarter mile a day total to and from the buses and commute by bus 11 miles a day (a lot of people would probably ride bikes more, though, if there were less cars on the roads). Assuming regular 5 day work weeks and 50 weeks of work a year, that equals 2750 miles of commuting by bus. Let’s add in another 25 miles a week for your shopping and socializing, so another 1300 miles.

We now have 4050 miles of bus commuting per person per year. At 0.25 lbs of C02 per mile, that is 1013 lbs of carbon.

Another thing Fresno should do as a city is lower their average summer temperature, and air pollution, by making sure there is around 40% tree cover throughout the city. https://www.mnn.com/earth-matters/climate-weather/blogs/trees-are-not-so-secret-weapon-keeping-our-cities-cool Instead of, say, 98 degrees in June, you’d have “only” 93 degrees at 4 p.m.

Since ozone pollution is caused by heat interacting with pollution emitted by cars and factories, there would be far less ozone and asthma attacks in Fresno. The trees would also help filter the inevitable smoke from wildfires in California every summer.

The third thing Fresno can do is find ways to help residents replace air conditioners with evaporative coolers. In the dry heat of Fresno, there are just as effective as air conditioning, about a third of the cost, and use far less electricity. Whenever an air conditioner breaks and needs to be replaced, it should be replaced with an evaporative cooler.

Baseline electrical usage per house:

Multiple house lights, CFL 200 wh

2 smartphones 11 wh a day to recharge

1 laptop or desktop 200 w, 60 min/day at 200 wh

1 tablet 50 wh

2 TVs (200 w each) 5 hours a day each at 2000 wh

1 game console 50 w 2 hours a day at 100 wh

Coffee maker 1500 w, or 500 wh

Microwave 1500 w, or 50 wh

Mixer 125 w or 25 wh

Garbage disposal 500 w or 50 wh

Slow cooker 200 w, or if used twice a week for eight hours, average 500 wh

Curling iron 90 w, 45 wh

Shaver 25 w, 5 wh

Hair dryer 1500 w, 250 wh

Wifi 24 w x 24 580 wh

Dryer 2000 w 1000 wh

Washing machine 500 w 300 wh

Vacuum 200 w, or 50 wh

Chest fridge 100 wh https://mtbest.net/chest_fridge.html

Chest freezer 1000 wh

Well insulated water heater 2500 w for 2 hours so 5000 wh

Baseline 12016 watt hours or 12 kwh per day.

Central air/heat 5000 w, or average out 1 hour on during winter and 8 hours on during summer equals 22 kwh per day

Once the switch to an evaporative cooler is made, ttps://phoenixmanufacturing.com/evaporative-cooling-how-it-works-and-why-it-saves-you-money/

you could use it full power for 8 hours a day at 2 kwh an hour for 16 kwh during summer and use heating (5 kwh) 1 hour a day during winter for an averaged out 10.5 kwh a day.

Total: 22.5 kwh a day.

Considering Fresno’s strong sun almost year round, this could easily produced by solar panels on the roof. This would equal 34 oz of C02 per day, or 776 lbs per year. Since the average Fresno household has 3 people, then that is only 259 lbs per person per year, leaving 728 lbs in your personal carbon budget.

We now have 728 lbs of carbon left in the budget for fun stuff – if you take a vacation with four people in an electric car, you can travel 2912 miles for vacations! Or, if you want to fly, you can travel 1450 miles guilt-free every year – even more if you find more areas to save carbon in your daily life. For example, from Fresno, you could fly round trip to both Vegas (520 miles) and Tijuana (668 miles) every year.