3
VANCOUVER — Although everyone in my family had agreed to have a "carbon coach," it was hard not to squirm as we waited for Helen Goodland to arrive at our Vancouver home.
I think of my family as good citizens who care about the environment -- but now our blithe assumption was being tested. We had invited professionals to peer into the drafty corners of our lives, assess our consumption and transportation choices and tell us how to slash the greenhouse gases we contribute to global warming.
Thinking of how often we use our Subaru Forester to do milk runs on rainy Vancouver days, how the household windows are often left open a crack for air circulation, and the vacation flights we plan for the year, I felt as self-conscious as the time a fitness coach measured the percentage of my body fat.
Carbon coaches have become a well-established profession in Europe, but despite the North America habit of hiring coaches for everything from style to career to reorganizing closets, carbon coaches are almost unheard of here.
Related Articles
Internet Links
For this assignment -- a story about whether a typical family of four in B.C.'s Lower Mainland could cut its greenhouse-gas emissions by 33 per cent, the goal the government has set for the province by 2020 -- Ms. Goodland, an architect and executive director of the non-profit Light House Sustainable Building Centre, and Ian Bruce, an engineer and climate-change expert with the David Suzuki Foundation, agreed to serve as our "carbon coaches."
"It's like a diet," said Ms. Goodland, who arrived by bus and sat at our dining table with a sheaf of documents about energy efficiency.
"But instead of weighing yourself, you take stock of your current consumption."
She said about 40 per cent of emissions from individuals in Greater Vancouver are from vehicles used for transportation, another 40 per cent from heating and otherwise running a house, and 20 per cent from production of consumables, from food to clothing.
Since 2000, my family and I have deliberately changed our lives to be more environmentally responsible. Seven years ago, because of jobs and the needs of two teenage boys, we found ourselves living in a suburban community where we were dependent on two cars to get to school, shops and work. For the year 2000, Mr. Bruce and other experts at the Suzuki Foundation estimated our emissions were 8.2 tonnes annually for our house, 2.8 tonnes for my husband's car, and 11 tonnes for my car, in which I commuted two or three times a week for a total of four hours per day. Even recycling newspapers and bottles required driving to a depot.
We were carbon gluttons.
The next year, partly for environmental reasons, we moved to a Vancouver neighbourhood where we have since lived within walking distance of our work, schools and universities and all shopping; we are ¼ of a block from two bus stops. We now have just one car, which is used mostly for work as a job requirement, and the occasional foray into the Interior.
From 2000 to 2007, considering the household and transportation, our domestic carbon emissions plummeted to 11.7 tonnes from 22 tonnes. We had become carbon paragons, with our household emitting an amount of greenhouse gases just over half of the national average.
We'd already made progress in being carbon-friendly. Would it be possible to cut another 33 per cent from our footprint? And what would my carbon coaches say when they found about our secret binging?
On Friday, in part two of The Carbon Diet, the coaches tell Deborah Jones and her family what further sacrifices will be necessary to meet their goal.
