Hybrid car or carbon offsets?
I’m in the market for a new car, and strongly motivated by Tim Flannery’s “The Weather Makers” I started to do the research on buying a hybrid car. Here in Australia that really means either the Honda Civic or the Toyota Prius, which start at $32,990 and $37,400 respectively. Since I particularly want a hatch, it’s really the Prius. This is a fairly substantial margin over what I’d normally pay for a car – my current car is an Astra which my wife and I have found to be great value, and if we replaced that with the new model, which starts at $21,990. Not equipped to the same level as the Prius, but enough to keep us happy 
Fifteen thousand dollars is a pretty big margin so out of curiousity, and prompted by Marty’s post on carbon neutrality, I decide to have a look at what it would cost me to offset my carbon emissions rather than use a hybrid vehicle. The results were a big surprise to me.
I used two different sites to calculate our family carbon debt. I assumed a new Astra manual, which uses 7.4 L / 100km (from the Australian Green Vehicle Guide), and that we do 20,000km per year. We already use green electricity, and we use an average of 150Mj of gas per day over the year (the vast majority in winter) for hot water, cooking and heating. I’ve also assumed that I do 3 business trips to Brisbane in a year, we take the family to Sydney once a year to visit grandma and to the equivalent of New York once a year to visit grandpa. The two sites gave comparable results, but the best breakdown came from Greenfleet. Our carbon debt is approximately:
- 3.34 tons from the car
- 3.51 tons from the house
- 41.07 tons from air travel
- 47.92 total
What surprised me is that the contribution of my air travel is over 12 times the contribution of my car! The conclusion is that I need to participate in some carbon offset program, but the interesting part was the cost – to offset all this carbon debt at CarbonFriendly (whose shop sucks, just by the way) was going to cost about $1000.00, and the car part of that would only be about $70 per year, so why should I go to the much greater expense of a hybrid vehicle?
I’m interested to find out of anyone else has gone through a similar decision process. Logic tells me that I should forget about the hybrid and pay for the carbon offsets, but part of me feels like this is somehow cheating. What do you think?
Well, there’s a few things to consider.
First, most of these carbon-neutralisation schemes, such as CarbonFriendly, are about generating carbon-free power. You don’t actually get any _reduction_ in CO2 emissions unless a power-plant is taken off-line , at least partially.
Secondly, what’s the basis of comparison? Different power-generation schemes have different CO2 emission levels. Although it’s not mentioned, I’d guess that it’s compared to a “brown-coal” power plant – the worst CO2 emitters around. But unless ClimateFriendly have some say over what power stations are taken off the grid, I’d guess that the brown-coal power plants are probably the last to go. Because they are the cheapest. Furthermore, there are good reasons to take LPG power plants off-line instead (mainly that LPG plants are easy to spin up and down), and LPG plants are relatively clean. So the offsets probably aren’t as neutral as they are made out to be.
So these offset packages aren’t as certain to be true offsets as you might wish. They certainly help, but they don’t go far enough.
If, however, you take the responsibility of _reducing_ your emissions, not offsetting them, then you know what effect you’ve had.
The best reason to buy a hybrid car today is that stimulating demand will drive their prices down. But that’s expensive on the hip pocket. Personally, I think that governments should use ultra-low-emission vehicles for their fleet cars – that will drive prices down faster than individual buyers.
For a $15000 price premium, you’re probably better off going for solar power in your own home. That sort of price tag will pay for a nice big 1500 watt solar system (http://www.energex.com.au/environment/solar_solutions/solar_solutions_solar_pv_residential.html); that will neutralise the energy costs to your house – and is easily measurable based on the size of your power bills. It will probably also have a positive effect on the equity of your home, not to mention that there are a few building societies out there doing really cheap loans for these sort of “green” projects.
I realise Steve was asking for opinions and experience and I certainly don’t begrudge yours however, I think essentially telling people that what they’re doing is a waste of time (because it only reduces emission by a small amount or is, at best neutral) is precisely the excuse the Australian Government gives for refusing to sign up to Kyoto; saying “…but don’t go far enough” is heard by the average person as “there’s no point in doing anything” and the Government knows it.
IMHO, every little bit counts.
No that’s off my chest, I do agree that, assuming you have the means, spending $15k on solar heating/water collection/etc. is a great investment though not always possible in the current economic climate.
One thing I did think of was perhaps adding an optional “carbon offset” to my invoices. If companies wished to pay it they could and it would go directly to an NGO or wind farms, etc. A sort of, “ethical blackmail” if you will. I’m not sure many (if any) customers would ever bother paying though.
Carbon offsets are tricky… I can understand the feeling that it’s cheating, but: Better is the enemy of good!
More helpfully, here’s a report on consumer carbon offsets. Also, some commentary, including responses from a few firms in the comments section.
(Personally, I’d base the decision on lifetime running costs rather than carbon, hoping that the cost reflects the total energy input (i.e. including manufacturing), rather than just the road costs.)
If I came across as saying that it was a waste of time, then I apologise; it isn’t a waste of time, and every bit does help.
All I was trying to say is that carbon offsets through green power may not be a complete offset – i.e. you may not be getting what you pay for. I never said it wasn’t worth doing.
(FWIW, I use carbon offsets myself through the “Green Power” option on my power bill – offsets the power for my house, but not my car and other factors)
I just thought I’d stick my head up here and point out that my company, Carbon Planet (see http://www.carbonplanet.com) retails forestry carbon credits sourced in New South Wales in the form of NGACs (New South Wales Greenhouse gas Abatement Certificates). What distinguishes us from ad-hoc tree-planting schemes is that, by retailing properly certified credits we can provide certainty that the money you pay really does remove CO2 from the atmosphere. A forestry NGAC certifies the removal of 1 tonne of CO2 and its storage for 100 years. On top of that NGACs are very strictly regulated to ensure that, should the trees burn down, or die the NGAC must be replaced by the provider.
A typical car amounts to only 5 tonnes of CO2 per year out of a total of 28 tonnes per Australian per year. (see our web-site for verification of those numbers). I believe you’d be better off keeping your current car and buying offsets than spending money on a new car. The carbon emissions associated with the manufacture of that new car would outweigh any benefits from it having a hybrid engine. But if you must get a new car then go for a diesel with the best fuel economy you can. Diesel engines are an old technology, and very simple to maintain compared to a hybrid.
Our latest newsletter (see http://www.carbonplanet.com/downloads/cp_newsletter_3.pdf) has a feature story on vehicle emissions.
I’d also like to add, and this is more generally about off-setters, if you are going to commit to buying carbon offsets, make sure you actually get ownership of the credits you buy. We create an account for you in the NSW greenhouse gas registry so you can be assured we are not selling the same credits over and over again.
Cheers
Dave Sag
CEO – Carbon Planet
Measure, reduce, then offset.
Not the prettiest blogger in the blogosphere – but he has some interesting posts on the Prius and ecological impact.
http://mangans.blogspot.com/search?q=prius
Thanks Dave. Some of the comments in that blog I’ve already seen debunked somewhere else, particularly the comments about Sudbury. The total cost of ownership models were constructed using some very interesting assumptions about years of life and mileage, though I don’t have them to hand.
This particular comment – “Jenkins goes on to say that the Prius saves no gasoline overall, as it’s merely used by someone else” is priceless. I just imagine someone hovering near me, figuring out how much petrol I saved by driving a Prius and buying that petrol themselves.
This is clearly an emotional topic for some people.
For anyone still reading and interested in the conclusion, we’re probably going to live with our current car a while longer and then buy a small diesel car. All combined with offset programs.
For anyone still reading and interested in the conclusion, we’re probably going to live with our current car a while longer and then buy a small diesel car. All combined with offset programs.
I think that is a wise choice. To hold on to a car as long as possible reduces the amount of pollution created in the manufacture of a new car.
Do you have FlexiCars in your region – they look pretty clever model.
This is clearly an emotional topic for some people.
But that’s (at least for me – YMMV) is the whole point of blogging.
One argument (of many) is:
In development, it is far more productive to expose applications, code and ideas for feedback than to keep them hidden. For example, design and code reviews produce better code, testing produces better applications, user feedback creates better products.
The same goes with ideas, opinions, emotions, core beliefs, passionate rants and ridiculously racist and ignorant comments.
By being brought out into the open, they can be reviewed, thought about, picked apart, shown to be lacking, given insight into or used to revise other arguments. And by being exposed to the feedback they are improved.
You may think that “But you can never convince a racist pig that his ideas are racist”. This is true, but ideas do leak through. For example, although I may not agree with you on the value of coding and programming, but your ideas and thoughts have seeped through into my own mental model of the world. The simplest examples are the terms YMMV and YAGNI which have come into my vocab.
Finally, everybody has an idea they are passionate about, that they hold close to their heart. It follows that if they’re not arguing using this idea, then their arguing about an idea they don’t really hold valuable. And there seems to be no point in getting feedback on something you don’t really hold dear.