stonemarmot.com/rants

By Bruce of Stone Marmot

Many Americans are rather vocal about their disappointment that the U. S. hasn’t ratified the Kyoto Agreements on environmental concerns. But nothing is stopping them from individually meeting the Kyoto Agreements. How many of these concerned Americans are making any effort to adhere to the agreements themselves?

Summarized, the Kyoto Agreements state that each signatory shall try to reduce its pollution to less than the levels of pollution it generated in 1990. As individuals, it is difficult to measure the pollution we are generating. But much of the pollution we generate is approximately proportional to the energy we use. It is usually fairly easy to determine the energy we use:

1) You can approximate the amount of gasoline you use by dividing the number of miles you drive over a year’s time by the miles per gallon (or miles per liter) fuel economy of your vehicle. For example, I drove 9700 miles in my vehicle, which gets about 23 mpg, which gives 9700 miles / 23 mpg = 422 gallons. I also drove 900 miles in a rental car that got 35 mpg, for 900 / 35 = 26 gallons. This is 422 + 26 = 448 gallons total last year. This compares to about 14000 miles in a vehicle that got 27 mpg, or 14000 / 27 = 519 gallons of gas in 1990. If you haven’t been specifically recording the miles you drive over a year’s time, you may be able to find approximate data in your vehicle’s maintenance records or your vehicle registration renewal forms.

2) Most all of us have electric bills from an electric utility. You can just compare your present energy use on your electric bills to the energy use on your 1990 electric bills. If you don’t have copies of our 1990 bills, you may be able to get copies from your power company. Be sure to compare energy used in kW-hr and not cost, since the cost of electricity has probably changed dramatically since 1990. For example, I used 3270 kW-hr of electricity in 1990, compared to 1168 kW-hr last year (2006). Incidentally, the typical U. S. household uses about 10,000 kW-hr a year and the typical all-electric household uses about 17,000 kW-hr a year. For comparison, the typical household in France and the UK uses about 3400 kW-hr a year.

3) If you use another form of energy, such as natural gas, today as well as back in 1990, you can again compare your use last year with that in 1990.

4) If you use another form of energy today but not back in 1990 or vice versa, things get a bit more complicated. You now have to convert the units for that other form of energy into the same units of the energy form it replaced. For example, if you used natural gas in 1990 but are now all electric, you have to convert the units the natural gas was measured in (probably cubic feet or liters at a particular pressure), determine how much energy was in each of those units (say BTUs per cubic feet or Joules per liter), and then convert that energy to kW-hr, which is what your electricity is measured in, and add that to your 1990 electrical consumption to determine your total energy use. There are so many variations possible here that I can’t give a nice neat formula that will work in all cases.

I suspect most of those who complain about the US not ratifying the Kyoto Agreements are not meeting the agreements themselves as individuals. How can you expect someone else to meet some criteria you yourself aren’t willing or able to meet? But if all those who are complaining meet the Kyoto Agreements as individuals, it starts to become moot whether the government ratifies the agreement or not, since a significant number of us will be meeting the agreements and peer pressure will force many other to also conform with the Agreements, effective making the country as a whole come close to, if not actually, meet the Agreements.