Footing carbon bill hits home

Sunday Mail Adelaide
Sunday 27/1/2008 Page: 19

WOULD you pay $1000 to completely carbon neutralise your home? Mike Rann's doing it with State Cabinet, spending $60,000 to lead the world in green politics. Hundreds of Australian businesses are doing it too. Even the Adelaide Bank Festival of Arts and the Clipsal 500 are getting in on the act. Me? I'm not so sure.

Leading US environmental campaigner Robert Kennedy Jnr - here soon for the International Solar Cities Congress - says the blitz against household emissions is a furphy, designed to divert attention from big industrial polluters. Households account for just one fifth of Australia's emissions (agriculture and manufacturing, by comparison, make up more than 55 per cent).

In 2005, global emissions from the burning of fossil fuels totalled 7.9 billion tonnes. The average Aussie house generates just 14 tonnes, which makes you wonder if changing our halogen globes is really going to make one iota of difference. So I called in the experts - the "carbon cops" from SA's leading climate change company Carbon Planet - to put me in the picture. And I was pretty shocked by the result.

I've always thought our place was reasonably energy efficient. Our stone house in the hills rarely needs cooling; we've installed a system to heat our water by solar and wood; we have two worm farms and we recycle everything that's not nailed down. How wrong I was. According to the energy audit, in 2007 our two adults- two-toddler household emitted four times the national average in greenhouse gases - or 51 tonnes.

Amazingly, we coughed out the most carbon when we travelled by air: holiday flights to the US, Queensland and Melbourne accounted for 55 per cent of our emissions. Next came electricity (24 per cent) and petrol (14 per cent). Our electricity consumption was more than double the state household average, thanks to reverse cycle heating, old appliances, halogen down-lights and other high wattage lighting. Even more shocking was standby on appliances, which accounted for 7 per cent of all electricity use (even leaving the mobile phone on its charger adds up).

Upshot? It would cost $1173 to totally offset our emissions (by buying one carbon credit for every tonne emitted, or 51 credits at the going rate of $23 a tonne). The cash would then be used to fund things like wind farms, shower and light bulb replacement schemes and old-growth forests. (I secretly wonder where all the trees are going to fit if this thing keeps going - but that's another column.) carbon credits are a great thing for businesses and politicians. Global warming is the biggest corporate social responsibility issue of our time, so they have a huge incentive to demonstrate their green credentials to consumers and voters.

Personally, I'm way more inclined to cut my power use than simply offset it all - because that's where I'll save both cash and emissions. We've started to turn stuff off instead of leaving it all on standby. Our next car will be mega energy efficient. I'm looking into the cheapest option for 100 per cent green energy and, as our house is slowly renovated, we'll buy green appliances and lighting.

But that still leaves those dastardly flights, accounting for around half of our emissions and requiring a $500 offset. But hey, if I can afford to fly to the US, I suppose I can afford to clean the emissions slate too. What I'd like is a button to press on the airline's website, telling me how much it will cost and how to make it happen (I've no doubt that will come in the not-to-distant future). The most important lesson I've learnt from this process, though, is that we small-scale polluters have a double responsibility. Yes, we should all be doing what we can to cut our household emissions.

But Robert Kennedy Jnr is right. Our biggest job is to pressure political leaders to end large-scale industrial and environmental pollution. Mike Rann has shown pretty amazing leadership on climate change - both by offsetting his personal flights and also through government initiatives to massively increase solar power and wind generation. Now he's got to use his influence federally and, most importantly, abroad, to affect change that will really clear the air.