If you're a technologist, you're probably familiar with Stack Overflow and the StackExchange network of websites. But did you know that the network includes a site dedicated to Sustainable Living? The subject material is:

Sustainable Living Stack Exchange is for folks dedicated to a lifestyle that can be maintained indefinitely without depleting available resources.

Of course, the StackExchange network always uses a Q&A format so the discussion can be quite a bit more limited than a free-form discussion forum like this one. But sometimes it's possible to find helpful answers there.

One of my favourite resources for understanding what we can do about climate change is Project Drawdown. The project evaluated 80 different major options for mitigating greenhouse gas emissions, and attempted to estimate the realistic costs and effectiveness of each.

https://www.drawdown.org/solutions-summary-by-rank

There are a few well-known solutions on there like wind turbines and solar farms, but I guarantee there are a few surprises as well.

Although most of my discussions about climate change are with people who are already familiar with the science, I do occasionally have a chance to introduce somebody who is interested but doesn't know much yet. For cases like that, it's great to have a resource I can share as a follow-up.

For that purpose, I was delighted to come across this webpage Climate Change: a pragmatic guide that was written by the team behind the upcoming Tmrow/Tomorrow app.

This resource is very approachable, and is much better for sharing than pointing somebody at the extremely lengthy and confusing IPCC reports!

There may be a future where zero-emissions aircraft are a reality. This might take the form of electric-drive aircraft, or it might be through conventional aircraft fueled by avgas created by capturing carbon from the atmosphere.

But aviation will probably be one of the most expensive sectors to decarbonize, just because of the reality of high power demand in a mobile system that transports both fuel and power plant. I'm not usually a fan of carbon offsets, but it probably does make sense for aviation as a sector. If avoiding one tonne of aviation emissions costs (hypothetically) $500, but avoiding one tonne of emissions elsewhere costs $50, then it would make a lot of sense to direct money toward the more effective solution.

I think the most important thing we should do as groups (and individually) is rally for appropriate taxes (ie. carbon tax) to be built into the cost of flying. This will slightly discourage some people from flying, and the remainder who still choose to fly can help fund carbon-reduction projects in other sectors.

That said, there does seem to be a place for #flyshame. Those of us who have the choice to fly should seriously consider whether a slower alternative (train, bus, ship) might be more responsible.

When we think of GHG/carbon emissions, we often think of smokestacks and tailpipe emissions that we can see in our own cities. These are known as Scope 1 emissions. These are relatively easy to measure, and relatively easy to assign responsibility for.

However, many goods and services that we purchase in cities have a more complicated footprint. For example, imagine that we're buying a new motorized scooter. We know that while we're using the scooter it will burn gasoline and create carbon emissions, and those will be added to the emissions from all other vehicles and sources in the city.

But the process of manufacturing the scooter also used energy and produced emissions, and it probably happened in a different city, or even across a border in a different country. Now it's harder to measure and harder to assign responsibility for. We should be trying to account for the entire lifecycle emissions of goods and services at the place where they are used!

This is just one example of how carbon emissions and other kinds of pollution can be exported to producer cities. For a lot more detail, I suggest reading the 2018 report from C40 cities about consumption-based accounting of GHG emissions.

https://www.c40.org/researches/consumption-based-emissions

Consumption-based GHG accounting is an alternative to the sector-based approach to measuring city GHG emissions. This focuses on the consumption of goods and services (such as food, clothing, electronic equipment, etc.) by residents of a city, and GHG emissions are reported by consumption category rather than GHG emission source category.

The C40 Cities group recently launched a new initiative called Good Food Ciites. This is a pledge by major cities around the world to transform their food systems to be much more sustainable within 10 years.

Cities committing to this declaration will work with citizens to achieve a ‘Planetary HealthDiet’ for all by 2030, with balanced and nutritious food, reflective of the culture, geography, and demography of their citizens.

They will achieve this by implementing the following measures by 2030:

• Aligning our food procurement to the Planetary Health Diet, ideally sourced from organic agriculture.
• Supporting an overall increase of healthy plant-based food consumption in our cities by shifting away from unsustainable, unhealthy diets.
• Reducing food loss and waste by 50% from a 2015 baseline.
• Within two years of endorsing this declaration, working with citizens, businesses, public institutions and other organizations to develop a joint strategy for implementing these measures and achieving these goals inclusively and equitably, and incorporating this strategy into our Climate Action Plan.

It is essential to get most cities on board with this, as discussed in another thread on this board.

You can do your part by writing to your mayor and city council, encouraging them to adopt the Good Food Cities pledge. Then ask your friends to do the same, and pass the message on!

Not sure if this question is intended to cover investing, but I think it's very worthwhile to talk about sustainable/socially responsible investing.

Most people have heard that it's possible to buy carbon offsets, where we donate money and hope that it's used to fund effective projects for abatement of emissions.

But I think that investments, where we have a chance to get our money back and repeat the process, are far more interesting. The best example of this that I've found in Canada is a company called CoPower which sells "green bonds" and uses the capital to fund development of renewable energy projects.

So I guess my answer is: we can move toward a sustainable future and make money doing it by investing smartly.

Very cool project!

I found the data presentation slightly confusing at first. For the question "How many days could be hotter than 90°F?" the answer provided in large bold text (▲8.1 days) appears to be a delta, not an absolute value.

It would probably be a good idea to indicate this by changing either the question text ("how many more days...") or by putting emphasis on the absolute value and removing emphasis on the delta.

Neat idea. How is it similar/different to CODEX and Capture?

Here's some other feedback I had after trying the app.

Introduction (the storyline)

• The illustrations are lovely
• The "skip" button is a bit hard to read (iPhone SE, 4" screen")
• The second slide ("then we became careless...") felt a bit over-the-top.
• The slide "By changing our behaviour one small step at a time" seems to perpetuate the attitude that lifestyle/behavioural change on its own is sufficient. I'm not sure how this could be worded differently, but I'd rather see language that doesn't exclude more social-political changes.

Impact Calculator

• I like that the score numbers (yearly CO2 impact) are displayed very large.
• How much does the country selection affect my score? That's not clear at all.
• The slider for "how big is your home" has a very large range, and it's impossible to select a round number with my imprecise thumb. I'd rather see a rounded number displayed to me -- or even better, an illustration of a house or floor plan that grows with the slider. Right now it just doesn't feel very nice. (Actually, the next slider for "how much do you drive" behaves perfectly!)
• The white and blue lines feel reversed on the slider -- it feels like it's filling from the right, instead of from the left.
• Dragging any of the sliders slowly causes it to jump around crazily. This is most pronounced on the last slider ("how often do you shop...")
• Showing my impact score next to the country average is a great idea. However, the app seems inconsistent in its use of "CO2" vs "greenhouse gases". Probably better to use CO2 in all places, unless other gases like methane (CH4) are being counted.

Personal Plan

• I guess everybody gets the same target: 4 tonnes CO2 by 2025, and the yearly goal is based on a linear interpolation toward that goal. However, the early reductions will probably be much easier than the later reductions, so I'd like to see a steeper curve in the first year that heads toward a plateau in the target year.

Today's impact score

• The non-rounded numbers for home/diet/travel/consumption are quite off-putting. (eg 5.60479362934)
• On an iPhone SE (4" screen) there's no visible indication that scrolling down will yield additional content
• Typo in "Today's Impact Score reflect [sic] your lifestyle's ..."

Notifications

• I received three (3) notifications in the span of about 5 minutes that all said: "eevie nudges you/to help you act on your habits!" This is very annoying. Don't do that.

Select Habits

• It's nice that a few habits are automatically marked "completed habit" based on my original answers
• However, it's annoying that completed habits are always shown first (on the left). That means I need to scroll through all the completed ones to find the next available one.
• All habits are presented equally, but they do not have equal impact. It might be helpful to people if there was some way to distinguish or sort by impact.
• Choosing "I'm already doing this" doesn't seem to affect the daily score calculation at all

That's all for now, but maybe I'll have more feedback later!

Habit Review

• It asks me "did you reuse your bag today?" but I didn't use any bags at all today. That doesn't fit into either of the available answers of "oops" or "yeah".

No, dryer balls don't seem to work as advertised, and they don't really reduce energy used by clothes dryers.

By dividing the energy used by the liter of water removed from the clothes, we get a number that can easy be compared. My four runs show results between 1.29 and 1.35 kWh needed to remove one liter of water. The average for the use of Dryer balls was 1.31 kWh/l and without was 1.32kWh/l. This is less than 1% difference, and a very clear conclusion that DRYER BALLS SAVE NO ENERGY.
Source: https://urge4lessenergy.blogspot.com/2009/03/dryer-balls-save-no-energy.html

Based on my results, I conclude that the mean drying time does not depend on whether dryer balls are used. In particular, dryer balls do not “reduce drying time by up to 25%.” The observed difference was about 1%, but that could be due to randomness. The time required to dry clothes depends on the weight of the wet clothes, but using dryer balls does not make any difference in the time it takes to dry the clothes, whether the load is small or large.
Source: https://blogs.sas.com/content/iml/2013/08/12/do-dryer-balls-reduce-drying-time.html

Both of these results intuitively make sense. An electric clothes dryer removes moisture from clothes by adding heat to evaporate the water. A dryer ball doesn't affect the temperature or amount of the water, so it's unclear how it could have any effect on the latent heat of evaporation.

Myth: BUSTED

Neat idea. How is it similar/different to CODEX and Capture?

Here's some other feedback I had after trying the app.

Introduction (the storyline)

• The illustrations are lovely
• The "skip" button is a bit hard to read (iPhone SE, 4" screen")
• The second slide ("then we became careless...") felt a bit over-the-top.
• The slide "By changing our behaviour one small step at a time" seems to perpetuate the attitude that lifestyle/behavioural change on its own is sufficient. I'm not sure how this could be worded differently, but I'd rather see language that doesn't exclude more social-political changes.

Impact Calculator

• I like that the score numbers (yearly CO2 impact) are displayed very large.
• How much does the country selection affect my score? That's not clear at all.
• The slider for "how big is your home" has a very large range, and it's impossible to select a round number with my imprecise thumb. I'd rather see a rounded number displayed to me -- or even better, an illustration of a house or floor plan that grows with the slider. Right now it just doesn't feel very nice. (Actually, the next slider for "how much do you drive" behaves perfectly!)
• The white and blue lines feel reversed on the slider -- it feels like it's filling from the right, instead of from the left.
• Dragging any of the sliders slowly causes it to jump around crazily. This is most pronounced on the last slider ("how often do you shop...")
• Showing my impact score next to the country average is a great idea. However, the app seems inconsistent in its use of "CO2" vs "greenhouse gases". Probably better to use CO2 in all places, unless other gases like methane (CH4) are being counted.

Personal Plan

• I guess everybody gets the same target: 4 tonnes CO2 by 2025, and the yearly goal is based on a linear interpolation toward that goal. However, the early reductions will probably be much easier than the later reductions, so I'd like to see a steeper curve in the first year that heads toward a plateau in the target year.

Today's impact score

• The non-rounded numbers for home/diet/travel/consumption are quite off-putting. (eg 5.60479362934)
• On an iPhone SE (4" screen) there's no visible indication that scrolling down will yield additional content
• Typo in "Today's Impact Score reflect [sic] your lifestyle's ..."

Notifications

• I received three (3) notifications in the span of about 5 minutes that all said: "eevie nudges you/to help you act on your habits!" This is very annoying. Don't do that.

Select Habits

• It's nice that a few habits are automatically marked "completed habit" based on my original answers
• However, it's annoying that completed habits are always shown first (on the left). That means I need to scroll through all the completed ones to find the next available one.
• All habits are presented equally, but they do not have equal impact. It might be helpful to people if there was some way to distinguish or sort by impact.
• Choosing "I'm already doing this" doesn't seem to affect the daily score calculation at all

That's all for now, but maybe I'll have more feedback later!

Habit Review

• It asks me "did you reuse your bag today?" but I didn't use any bags at all today. That doesn't fit into either of the available answers of "oops" or "yeah".

@CODEX How do you compute the baseline? If I go for a leisurely Sunday ride on a bicycle, is that treated as an "offset" the same way as if I ride my bicycle on my weekday commute to and from work?

There may be a future where zero-emissions aircraft are a reality. This might take the form of electric-drive aircraft, or it might be through conventional aircraft fueled by avgas created by capturing carbon from the atmosphere.

But aviation will probably be one of the most expensive sectors to decarbonize, just because of the reality of high power demand in a mobile system that transports both fuel and power plant. I'm not usually a fan of carbon offsets, but it probably does make sense for aviation as a sector. If avoiding one tonne of aviation emissions costs (hypothetically) $500, but avoiding one tonne of emissions elsewhere costs $50, then it would make a lot of sense to direct money toward the more effective solution.

I think the most important thing we should do as groups (and individually) is rally for appropriate taxes (ie. carbon tax) to be built into the cost of flying. This will slightly discourage some people from flying, and the remainder who still choose to fly can help fund carbon-reduction projects in other sectors.

That said, there does seem to be a place for #flyshame. Those of us who have the choice to fly should seriously consider whether a slower alternative (train, bus, ship) might be more responsible.

@ericvanular Is it possible to delete tags which are unused? For example, this "free energy" tag.

Everyone knows that combustion of gasoline creates greenhouse gas emissions, so one of the most popularly known options for reducing greenhouse gas emissions is to switch to an electric-drive vehicle (EV). However, this comes with a very large up-front cost that makes it unreachable for many people.

For example, a new Nissan Leaf costs around USD$30,000. Compared to driving a car with an internal combustion engine (an "ICE" vehicle) the Leaf would reduce emissions by about 15 tonnes of CO2. As a back-of-the-napkin calculation, this means the cost of emissions abatement is around $2000/tonne. That's way higher than any carbon tax or carbon offset! Surely there are much cheaper options available.

Which actions can we take in our personal lives (those which we have total decisive control over) have the best bang for the buck in terms of cost per tonne of avoided CO2 or CO2e?

If you're a technologist, you're probably familiar with Stack Overflow and the StackExchange network of websites. But did you know that the network includes a site dedicated to Sustainable Living? The subject material is:

Sustainable Living Stack Exchange is for folks dedicated to a lifestyle that can be maintained indefinitely without depleting available resources.

Of course, the StackExchange network always uses a Q&A format so the discussion can be quite a bit more limited than a free-form discussion forum like this one. But sometimes it's possible to find helpful answers there.

Although most of my discussions about climate change are with people who are already familiar with the science, I do occasionally have a chance to introduce somebody who is interested but doesn't know much yet. For cases like that, it's great to have a resource I can share as a follow-up.

For that purpose, I was delighted to come across this webpage Climate Change: a pragmatic guide that was written by the team behind the upcoming Tmrow/Tomorrow app.

This resource is very approachable, and is much better for sharing than pointing somebody at the extremely lengthy and confusing IPCC reports!

Not sure if this question is intended to cover investing, but I think it's very worthwhile to talk about sustainable/socially responsible investing.

Most people have heard that it's possible to buy carbon offsets, where we donate money and hope that it's used to fund effective projects for abatement of emissions.

But I think that investments, where we have a chance to get our money back and repeat the process, are far more interesting. The best example of this that I've found in Canada is a company called CoPower which sells "green bonds" and uses the capital to fund development of renewable energy projects.

So I guess my answer is: we can move toward a sustainable future and make money doing it by investing smartly.

I was delighted to see this in the news! And it seems like we might have XR to thank for this development.

BBC News, Nov 2, 2019: Climate change: Thousands invited to join citizens' assembly

Anyone who has being paying attention has probably already heard of XR/Extinction Rebellion. They've earned a bit of airtime over the last year by organizing peaceful civil disobedience, and they've had a few publicity stunts. They have three main demands, the third of which is to create a citizens' assembly on climate. So now it seems like the XR tactics have worked in the UK, because the government is forming a citizens' assembly exactly as demanded. We can probably learn something from this movement.

I've seen a lot of articles and studies that attempt to assess the "true cost of carbon". Although they may come up with wildly different numbers, one thing that seems to be consistently true is that the estimates are much higher than the price of buying carbon offsets.

• EDF USD$50/tonne
• OECD USD$33/tonne
• Werner-Schmidt USD$150/tonne (for BECCS)

But when I look at the current pricing of carbon offsets, such as from this Canadian company I see prices like USD$15-18. How can these offset companies be running so efficiently? Can these prices be realized at a global scale and enduring over time?