[Coral-List] Footprint calculator and coral troubles

Robert Nowicki rnowicki at mote.org
Wed Jan 24 16:46:09 EST 2018


I played with the calculator a bit yesterday and was surprised at how high
my own score was.  While I try best practices with fuel and energy
consumption, these were overshadowed by relatively small changes to diet-
specifically reduction in animal product consumption.  The second was, as
others mentioned, flights.

For those who eat a lot of meat (I was raised on a "steak and potatoes"
diet myself), run the calculator a second time and reduce your animal
product consumption by one full "category".  While representing a small
change in behavior, I found the impact to my footprint surprising.



Dr. Rob Nowicki

Postdoctoral Research Fellow
Elizabeth Moore International Center for Coral Reef Research & Restoration
Mote Marine Laboratory
24244 Overseas Highway
Summerland Key, FL 33042

Office phone: (305) 509-6562


On Wed, Jan 24, 2018 at 11:35 AM, frahome at yahoo.com <frahome at yahoo.com>
wrote:

> Dear all,
> Beside the point highlighted by Caren the aspect I stress isthat I believe
> that doing coral reef research is not enough while we do knowenough, and
> that doing something to change the way our society works would bemuch more
> effective. And this is not only about lowering our own individual
> footprint,but more about engaging in projects that do bring change to the
> system, orbetter that do develop a new one that makes the old one obsolete
> as BuckminsterFuller would suggest.
>
> Probably this is all out of frustration because I am tryingto do so but
> everybody else seems busy doing something else while fullyembracing the
> current model.
>
>
>
> As far as sustainable tourism, maybe in a world of locallow-consumption
> sustainable economies, where we cut out most of our emissionsincluding work
> related and freights flights, there will be some room  for sustainable
> tourism in the sense ofopportunities to fulfill human beings desire of
> exploring new lands once in awhile, but I do not think that there is place
> for anything similar to what wehave now (tourism “industry” including the
> current "sustainable"version of it). I see many potential issues arising
> where a place tries to rely on tourism for its livelihood.
>
>
> Francesca      From: Carin Jantzen <carin.jantzen at gmx.net>
>  To: "Cummings, Katy" <Katy.Cummings at MyFWC.com>; "
> coral-list at coral.aoml.noaa.gov" <coral-list at coral.aoml.noaa.gov>; "
> frahome at yahoo.com" <frahome at yahoo..com>
>  Sent: Wednesday, January 24, 2018 10:27 AM
>  Subject: Re: [Coral-List] Footprint calculator and coral troubles
>
>  Hi all,
>
>  There are different kind of calculators, computing your footprint
> differently (I dont know how, I must admit), but I think, this is not
> really the point... Whether you use 1.2 or 1.6 earths or how much tons of
> CO2 your way of life causes exactly may not be important here... I think
> Francesca wanted to draw our attention to the fact that even we listers -
> well informed and aware of the threat - still live an unsustainable life,
> feeding the ongoing climate change with our emissions.
>
>  Even though many of us are trying to change that, most of us still have a
> way to go (like me...).
>  If you try this calculator, sharing your results or not, may reveal our
> weak spot: we are taking this not serious enough to change our life (even
> we!). Are we prepared to go the whole way?
>
>  I totally agree that its much better to not pollute than doing so and
> trying to fix it later. But as many of us listers do fly (for scientific
> field work, for diving, to attend conferences, family visits, wse...), I
> would be interested if in some cases you may think "the end justifies the
> means“ (and who would decide on that?), or how one may deal with it? In my
> opinion, we should try to limit flights where possible, as there may be
> other options, such as attending a conference via video or alike... But
> what about the rest? Its probably not realistic to demand to stop all
> flying at once... and what about tourism - a sustainable tourism may be
> chance for many coral reefs...?
>   I would be curious to read your thoughts on that!
>    Best,
>  Carin
>  On 22.01.2018 20:23, Cummings, Katy wrote:
>
>
> #yiv1029623452 #yiv1029623452 -- P {margin-top:0;margin-bottom:0;}#yiv1029623452
> I also did the carbon footprint calculator - I drafted an email but must
> not have sent it. Overall I was shocked at how big my contributions were
> (1.8 Earths). I consider myself a fairly environmentally conscious person
> but the amount I fly over the year totally negates everything else.
> Definitely something to think about as we travel to our field sites and fly
> to scientific conferences....  It was interesting to see which areas of my
> carbon consumption are most impactful. For example, going solar would drop
> my impact to 1.7 Earths, but stopping flying would drop me down to 1.2
> Earths. I would be very curious to see how this is all calculated.
>
>   See you on the other side of the shut down!
>     From: coral-list-bounces at coral.aoml.noaa.gov <
> coral-list-bounces at coral.aoml.noaa.gov> on behalf of frahome at yahoo.com <
> frahome at yahoo.com>
>  Sent: Friday, January 19, 2018 6:56:44 PM
>  To: Carin Jantzen; coral-list at coral.aoml.noaa.gov
>  Subject: Re: [Coral-List] Footprint calculator and coral troubles
>  Thank you Carin for taking up the invitation! You are the only one that
> has done so until now.I don't know if the other many subscribers didn't
> have  time to go through the calculator, didn't find the challenge
> interesting or if they didn't feel comfortable with sharing the results.
>  I am highly skeptical about the compensation concept in the way it's
> framed.. Of course it is better to plant trees if you are polluting than
> not to do so, but that should not make you feel ok about polluting. Looking
> at the current situation we should likely be compensating  every day for
> our footprint and for those of others rather than engaging in some
> "extraordinary" polluting activity and then compensate for it. I think
> there were discussions on the subject in the past on the list. Here the
> reason why the calculator doesn't take into considerationcompensation:http
> s://www.footprintnetwork.org/footprint-calculator-faq/#gen10
>  In all cases the purpose of going through the calculator is for me not
> only about finding out what we could do at individual level to lower our
> footprint and start walking the talk, but more on finding out what kind of
> projects we should all start working on to engage people in lowering  their
> footprint at a larger scale (family, school, workplace, community,
> neighborhood, city). Instead of just buying local food what about starting
> a farmer's market project or a community garden that allows people to grow
> their food? Instead of just putting solar panels on your  house what about
> starting a project that engages your neighborhood to do so? Etc etc..
>
>  RegardsFrancesca
>
>
>   From: Carin Jantzen <carin.jantzen at gmx.net>
>   To: "frahome at yahoo.com" <frahome at yahoo.com>; "
> coral-list at coral.aoml.noaa.gov" <coral-list at coral.aoml.noaa.gov>
>   Sent: Thursday, January 18, 2018 11:12 AM
>   Subject: Aw: [Coral-List] Footprint calculator and coral troubles
>
>  Hi Francesca, hi all,
>
>  Very good idea!
>  As I take efforts to live and consume sustainable, I was quite shocked to
> still using 1.4 planets... expiring date in Sept...
>  So, I have still a lot to do!
>
>  At the moment, I do not fly, neither for work nor privately, which helps
> a lot...
>  But I did in the past, and many of us do, so, I have a question for you
> all:
>  Do you compensate for flying? Like donating to an organization that
> plants trees or alike???
>
>  Would be great to get your thoughts on that!
>
>  Best,
>  Carin
>  --
>  Diese Nachricht wurde von meinem Android Mobiltelefon mit GMX Mail
> gesendet..Am 11.01.2018, 01:02, "frahome at yahoo.com" <frahome at yahoo.com>
> schrieb:
>  Dear listers,
>  Following on Dennis message, I invite all listers to use the new
> entertaining ecological footprint calculator made available by those that
> invented the footprint concept and to post their result to the list.
>  Here the link (it takes about 10 mins going through all the "add details"
> options):https://www.footprintcalculator.org/
>
>  Let's see what it is the footprint (in planets and in tonnes of carbon)
> of the average coral lister and then maybe we will also better understand
> why corals are in trouble and where we should look for solutions.
>  Here my results:This past 2017 I lived like I would have available 1.6
> planets, well above our planet capacity unfortunately (though well below my
> country average).
>  Ecological footprint: 2.8 hectarsCarbon footprint: 5.3
> tonnes/yearPlanets: 1.6
>  Here some suggestions:To know how much of your electricity comes from
> renewables search for the percentage declared by your electricity provider
> (and adjust it if you have additional sources like solar panels)To know how
> much you drive by car per week take your yearly kilometres and  divide them
> by 52. If you drive boats add that kilometers to your car statistics. Same
> for bus or train, add your yearly km and divide by 52.
>  As far as square meters of living space don’t forget to add up any second
> house or storage place you might have.
>
>  CheersFrancesca
>
>
>
>   From: Dennis Hubbard <dennis.hubbard at oberlin.edu>
>   To: Sarah Frias-Torres <sfrias_torres at hotmail.com>
>  Cc: Coral Listserver <coral-list at coral.aoml.noaa.gov>
>   Sent: Wednesday, January 10, 2018 6:37 PM
>   Subject: Re: [Coral-List] Call to Action Re: New paper on coral
> bleaching in Science
>
>  Sarah:
>
>  Thanks for your engagement on this. I've thought a lot about carbon issues
>  over the years and have come to a couple of conclusions on both of the
>  fronts that you address, so here are my two cents worth on the first half
>  of your question.
>
>  On carbon, there are two levels where we can address this. One is at the
>  large, political scale. While I think that we need to keep slogging on
> this
>  front, I'm not holding out a lot of hope (some of this is magnified by
>  recent political events at home, but I was already getting skeptical
>  beforehand). At the other end of he scale, there is personal engagement,
>  which I particularly like because it makes politics irrelevant. We
> recently
>  installed 3 kw of solar panels. The interesting thing i that this was the
>  smallest system they could install and is 50% above our electrical needs..
>  Going back to my time on  St. Croix, we had neither heat not air
>  conditioning - we faced into the Trade Winds. We have to do something
> about
>  heat in northern Ohio and fortunately we can use an abandoned gas well to
>  supplement natural gas from the local supplier. Gas is not perfect, but
>  ironically it turns out that it's carbon footprint is  on the order of
>  60-70% of most distributed electricity, regardless of how green the source
>  is - included distributed solar. The only thing that beats it here is the
>  fact that Oberlin burns landfill gas to generate 50% of the city's
>  electricity; this is all "free" carbon-wise as it is being flared off
>  already with no payback in "work". I won't get into the environmental
>  justice issues tied to this - a saga for another day.
>
>  To help offset some of the carbon from the well, we also installed a heat
>  pump to use up some of that excess power we can't use from the panels.
> And,
>  we should be taking delivery on a plug-in hybrid within the next 30 days
>  (we have a 10-year olf gen-!! Prius that is slowly dieing). With the
>  back-and-forth to work (less than 2 miles - passive choices like living
>  withing within walking distance of work are often overlooked), the mileage
>  approaches 100 mpg - and whatever isn't coming from the gas tank is coming
>  off the panels. We also, just packed the walls of a ca. 1850 house with
>  cellulose to cut down on heat loss. I'm a big advocate of retrofitting old
>  buildings over building new uber-efficient replacements. We have two of
> the
>  most efficient buildings on the planet on the Oberlin campus. One is the
>  Lewis Center, brain-child of David Orr. It is the most efficient building
>  on campus. Ironically, the least efficient building on campus is the new
>  science center, even with all of it's fancy bells and whistles. I really
>  enjoy he irony of the fact that the second-most-efficient building on
>  campus with respect to heat is the geology building - built ca 1850...
> it's
>  hard to beat 2 ft of sandstone (plus new efficiency measures) when it
> comes
>  to keeping heat in. We use efficient heat-recovery systems for our fume
>  hoods, unlike the science center that just vents heat out in the winter
> and
>  cool air in the summer. (they are working on that as a retrofit, but it
>  should have been part of the original plan). And, it was built from
>  sandstone that was sledded down from the local quarry when the streets
> were
>  frozen - a low carbon answer based on a stone age solution to a space-age
>  problem - embedded carbon.
>
>  So, I guess my bottom line here is personal accountability. While it does
>  little to affect political change, I do think a lot more about my personal
>  footprint. I do feel that we too often leapfrog over our personal
>  responsibility while we admonish "the system" for not coming up with the
>  answers we want to see. I wish the "system" did more to reduce our carbon
>  footprint. In the meantime, however small my personal part of this bigger
>  problem might be, I feel that starting in my own back yard gives me the
>  right to point fingers. At the College, we have spent a lot of time
>  thinking about offsets and have come to the conclusion that we'd prefer to
>  not use them to reach carbon neutrality as an institution. However,
> because
>  "you can't get there from here" without offsets, we've spent a lot of time
>  thinking about ways to make them more palatable.  Te main problem is that
>  you really don't understand where the few dollars you pay to an airline
>  actually go; there are similar problems throughout the offset system. At
>  Oberlin, we have set up something called the "Green Edge Fund", paid for
> by
>  student fees. The fund covers the costs of small-scale start-ups (we could
>  have even used it for some of our solar start-up at home). The goal is to
>  have home-grown projects in place that we understand from a carbon
>  perspective. Hopefully, when we have to start thinking about offsets to
> get
>  that last little bit of carbon to achieve neutrality by 2025, there will
> be
>  local entities in place that we understand from a carbon perspective. So,
>  rather than investing in  a rain-forest tree that might no actually get
>  planted, we can invest in things like locally sourced food (a program that
>  serves as a middle man between sustainable farmers and restaurants so that
>  farmers just have to farm and restaurants just have to turn out
> sustainable
>  meals at a profit) or a sustainable dairy, or some other project for which
>  we know the pros and cons because we helped provide the funds to get it
>  started.
>
>  I've gone on way too long about just the first part of your question. So,
>  I'll save the list-serve from my ranting on the second half and put that
>  off for another day. The short preview is that I have no fundamental
>  problem with the motivation to "fix what we've broken." My major concern
> is
>  less about under-performance than it is with unintended consequences.
>  But... stay tuned for part II.
>
>  Best,
>
>  Dennis
>
>  On Tue, Jan 9, 2018 at 11:08 AM, Sarah Frias-Torres <
>  sfrias_torres at hotmail.com> wrote:
>
>  > As Pogo says, "We have met the enemy, and he is us"
>  >
>  >
>  > The recent Science paper (Hughes et al 2018;
>  > http://science.sciencemag.org/content/359/6371/80) shows a bleak global
>  > picture for coral reefs. We must stop burning fossil fuels if we want a
>  > future for coral reefs as we know them.
>  >
>  >
>  > At this crossroads, we can either give up or keep fighting.
>  >
>  >
>  > I choose to fight.
>  >
>  >
>  > This is a Call to Action to those who still want to fight, against all
>  > odds, so coral reefs will have a future.
>  >
>  >
>  > We have many strategies on the table. It's uncertain which strategy is
>  > going to work.
>  >
>  >
>  > From the angle of coral reef restoration, I call on the restoration
>  > community to work together, to share failures and successes and move
>  > towards large-scale restoration.
>  >
>  >
>  > To the critics of coral reef restoration, I ask you to work with us.
> Don't
>  > just say: "this won't work". Give us constructive criticism, share your
>  > concerns with us. Is it a failure of the scientific process (validity of
>  > hypothesis testing) or is it an engineering concern (bringing the
> process
>  > to scale)?. The solution is very different in each case.
>  >
>  >
>  > For everyone on this list, let's find ways to work together, from
> science
>  > to implementation, to communication, to everything in between.
>  >
>  >
>  > It's all hands on deck now.
>  >
>  >
>  > Sarah Frias-Torres, PhD
>  >
>  > Twitter: @GrouperDoc
>  > Science Blog: https://grouperluna.com/
>  > Art Blog: https://oceanbestiary.com/
>  > https://www.researchgate.net/profile/Sarah_Frias-Torres
>  > ________________________________
>  > From: coral-list-bounces at coral.aoml.noaa.gov <coral-list-bounces at coral..
>  > aoml..noaa.gov> on behalf of Mark Eakin - NOAA Federal <
>  > mark.eakin at noaa.gov>
>  > Sent: Friday, January 5, 2018 12:07 PM
>  > To: Coral Listserver
>  > Subject: [Coral-List] New paper on coral bleaching in Science
>  >
>  > For the first time, an international team of researchers has measured
> the
>  > escalating rate of coral bleaching at locations throughout the tropics
> over
>  > the past four decades. The study documents a dramatic shortening of the
> gap
>  > between pairs of bleaching events, threatening the future existence of
>  > these iconic ecosystems and the livelihoods of many millions of people..
>  >
>  > "The time between bleaching events at each location has diminished
>  > five-fold in the past 3-4 decades, from once every 25-30 years in the
> early
>  > 1980s to an average of just once every six years since 2010," says lead
>  > author
>  > Prof Terry Hughes, Director of the ARC Centre of Excellence for Coral
> Reef
>  > Studies (Coral CoE).
>  >
>  > “Reefs have entered a distinctive human-dominated era – the
> Anthropocene,”
>  > said co-author, Dr C. Mark Eakin of the National Oceanic & Atmospheric
>  > Administration, USA. "The climate has warmed rapidly in the past 50
> years,
>  > first making El NinÞos dangerous for corals, and now we're seeing the
>  > emergence of bleaching in every hot summer."
>  > For more, see the full paper at:
>  > https://nam02.safelinks.protection.outlook.com/?url=
> http%3A%2F%2Fscience.
>  > sciencemag.org%2Fcontent%2F359%2F6371%2F80&data=02%7C01%7C%
>  > 7C28c288a0e1314412a06d08d554606f2c%7C84df9e7fe9f640afb435aaaaaaaa
>  > aaaa%7C1%7C0%7C636507695516397420&sdata=%2FOiYD4VTlVb%
>  > 2BnUWgRfXbfPnwRT6ZA80OXJ48dtqH0Aw%3D&reserved=0
>  >
>  > Cheers,
>  > Mark
>  > ------------------------------------------------------------------
>  > C. Mark Eakin, Ph.D.
>  > Coordinator, NOAA Coral Reef Watch
>  > National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration
>  > Center for Satellite Applications and Research
>  > Satellite Oceanography & Climate Division
>  > e-mail: mark.eakin at noaa.gov
>  > url: coralreefwatch.noaa.gov
>  > Twitter: @CoralReefWatch FB: Coral Reef Watch
>  >
>  > NOAA Center for Weather and Climate Prediction (NCWCP)
>  > 5830 University Research Ct., E/RA32
>  > College Park, MD 20740
>  > Office: (301) 683-3320    Fax: (301) 683-3301
>  > Mobile: (301) 502-8608    SOCD Office: (301) 683-3300
>  >
>  > “You would have to reject the “greenhouse effect” outright to conclude
> that
>  > human activities pumping millions of tons of CO2 and other greenhouse
>  > gases into the atmosphere every year are having little or no impact on
> the
>  > earth’s climate. That is simply not a tenable position."
>  > William K. Reilly, EPA Administrator under President George H.W. Bush,
>  > June 18 2014
>  > _______________________________________________
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>
>
>
>
>  --
>  Dennis Hubbard
>  Chair, Dept of Geology-Oberlin College Oberlin OH 44074
>  (440) 775-8346
>
>  * "When you get on the wrong train.... every stop is the wrong stop"*
>   Benjamin Stein: "*Ludes, A Ballad of the Drug and the Dream*"
>  _______________________________________________
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>
>
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>
> |  | Virenfrei. www.avg.com  |
>
>
>  --
> Dr. Carin Jantzen
> Marine Ecologist & Author
> Media & Public Relations SECORE International
>
>
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