I came across this article on shrinking your carbon footprint:
Salina Journal News: Shrinking footprints
(which incidentally says almost nothing about what individuals can do to reduce their footprint, so seems misleading). But it got me thinking. Bear with me, this will take a bit of time, but I should get there by the end of the post.
Yesterday, I drove away from my house twice - to two different high-density areas - to meet two different people for two different purposes. And in contemplating my energy expenditure for both those trips (small, given my car, but noticeable nonetheless), I realized that I could have shrunk that footprint if I had known the details of both meetings earlier than I did. I first drove to one place early in the afternoon, had my meeting, then drove home. The drive took about 25 minutes each way, which means I not only was burning fuel, but also spending time rather unproductively in operating my car.
The second (early evening) meeting was only organized that afternoon (in fact, I made the arrangements as I was waiting for the first meeting to start). It was further away, but actually took about the same time to get there. Once I was there, my husband also came with his car because he was coming directly from work. Which means we drove two vehicles back from the same place. You might see where I'm going with this.
Had I known when/where I was meeting people yesterday, I could have organized things so that I only left once and went from one meeting to the next. Instead, there was enough time between the two that I returned home and worked for a few hours in-between.
In addition, had I known that we would have the second meeting and where it was taking place, I could have used public transit to go to the first meeting, move to the second one, then get a ride home. Of course in this city there's a disincentive to actually go with public transit because it would have cost just as much (and possibly a bit more) to buy two transit tickets as it did to burn the fuel I used in my car. (I realize there are other costs associated with the car option, but it is so ridiculously fuel-efficient that the numbers come out very close. And that's without factoring in the time cost of the less-rapid public transit option.)
What I'm getting at in thinking about this is that it's not just about the car or the public transit. Some of what I could have done yesterday to reduce my carbon footprint depended on very social elements of the day, including waiting for a call from the organizer of the second meeting.
In fact, much of my week has been this way. I did manage on Monday to book the two meetings I had back to back, but on Tuesday, I ended up again going home between commitments because I'd had to book the appointment I had in the afternoon weeks ahead of time and then couldn't change it to a time that made more efficient use of both my time and energy expenditure.
Now, I realize that I can't always organize my week efficiently like that, and I'd hate to be so rigid that everything has to be accurately planned out ahead of time. But it struck me as I was thinking about car travel and footprints, and then about my time and my anxiety that I will not get everything that needs to be done finished in time before the semester starts, that maybe we're not talking enough about behaviour changing when we talk about carbon footprints.
We talk about changing light bulbs, and car pooling and getting more public transit options to encourage people to use them, and yet at the same time, I suspect my week is like many other people's in that we spend a lot of time and energy moving around inefficiently, rather than making it more effective. My teaching schedule this term is an example. Because I teach in two different departments, it's been hard to concentrate all the classes on two or three days. Instead, I teach all five days of the week and for four of those days, I'm only teaching one class on that day. That means I'm going to the school every day, a fairly inefficient use of my time, especially since my job does not require me to be physically present when I'm not teaching. (It also means I will need to spend an hour in my car or three hours on public transit each day. Guess which option I'm leaning toward?)
But to return to the question of the social influences on energy consumption. What if we started thinking about energy consumption as more than just kilowatts of electricity or litres of fuel? What if we started thinking about it in terms of hours of energy expenditure? Or started talking about efficiencies of movement in our cities? What if we thought not just about how roads or bus lines connect with each other, but also paid more attention to how people really move through our cities rather than some abstract idea of how we think they might move through them?
I know this city's transit is organized on the assumption everyone wants to go downtown. But lots of us don't. And then we don't use transit because it doesn't go where we want to go without taking us through downtown first (this is why transit is 3x longer than driving to get to my place of employment). Maybe that focus on centrality is efficient on paper, but it certainly isn't for individuals users. But maybe if we started thinking about people individually, we could get somewhere (literally and figuratively!) Given the kinds of geographic mapping technologies we have and computing power, should we not be able to find ways of making an individual's days more efficient by creating systems that do more than just assume everyone is going to one place?
And isn't there a way that I, as one of those individuals, can find a way to make my own movement through the city more efficient, both in terms of my time and my energy expenditure by organizing my days and activities more efficiently? Why does it seem like the more technologies we have for organizing things, the less efficient we seem to get? Perhaps our carbon footprint is a result of social inefficiencies as much as it is structural ones? I'll be thinking about how my social connections affect my energy consumption over the next while, for sure. It might not yield any fascinating insights, but, then again, perhaps it might.
The start of semester is always a bit of a roller coaster ride for me, as it is for most academics. Regardless of how much prep I've started before classes begin, it always feels like I'm falling behind as soon as Labour Day is over. (It doesn't help that the JIL starts a week or two after classes and the research and letter writing for that takes a HUGE amount of time.) But by the end of September, things are usually starting to clear up and the initial rush of preparation lulls a bit before the rush builds again with midterms and other assignments.