Case study 3: Charlotte, North Carolina.
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?!?
Charlotte is a city of about 860,000 spread over 305 square miles, quite a lot of sprawl. Per capita income is $31,844 versus US average of $31,786. The city is headquarters for quite a few churches and denominations and has the second-most banking assets after NYC. Weather tends to be hot and humid in the summer and mild in the winter, not usually going below 30 degrees. They get about 40 inches of rain per year, and there is quite a lot of agriculture in North Carolina, with about 8.6 million acres in farmland. https://www.farmflavor.com/north-carolina-agriculture/
On average, workers in the city of Charlotte have a 9.7 mile commute. The bus transit system has about 81,000 rides a day, so 40,500 round trips? They do have light rail as well, but as usual we are focusing mainly on increasing bus ridership as that is easiest to do fast.
Let’s assume bus commuters will walk about a quarter mile a day total to and from the buses and commute by bus 18 miles a day (figure includes more people probably riding bikes). Assuming regular 5 day work weeks and 50 weeks of work a year, that equals 4500 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 5800 miles of bus commuting per year. At 0.25 lbs of C02 per mile, that is 1450 lbs of carbon out of our budget of 2000.
Charlotte is actually a leader in installing solar panels already and should be proud of their city. https://patch.com/north-carolina/charlotte/here-s-why-charlotte-among-winners-solar-energy
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 2 hours on during winter and 10 hours on during summer, 28 kwh. Charlotte is too humid for evaporative cooling, so we’ll stick with air conditioning.
Total: 40 kwh a day.
This would be partially produced by solar panels at home and partially energy utility solar panels – or wind.
Using all solar power, this would equal 60.5 oz of C02 per day, or 1387 lbs per year. Since average household in Charlotte has 2.6 people, you’ll need to make your own calculations, but if we round to 2.5 then mathematically that is 555 lbs per person per year. Oops! Now we are 5 lbs over the carbon budget and have no room left for fun stuff!
Some options –
- You can move closer to work – or change jobs. Each mile closer to your work saves you 125 lbs of carbon a year. If you shave off 10 miles you will cut 1250 lbs of carbon out of you budget and be able to fly an extra 2500 miles for vacations every year.
- If you have no children in the house, enough bedrooms, and want some extra money, consider renting out your rooms. Not only will you make extra money, you will cut way down on your share of the house’s carbon footprint, as it costs the same to heat or cool a house with 1 or 4 people in it. If you get four people per house and have solar installed (or buy green energy) then your carbon footprint from the house will only be about 347 lbs, giving you some leeway again.
These are just some ideas. People are nothing if not creative, so have fun figuring out your own solutions!