Half way through the year.
Transport stuff:Miles I've cycled so far this year - 2431
Miles our family car has moved - 1315
Cycling is about 10% just for fun, 90% going places, 75% commuting.
Driving is dominated by the two big 500 mile round trips (one to friends, one to in-laws) we've made so far this year. Two more trips to in-laws planned this year. We've got our other car mileage down to something like 50 miles a month.
Unlike last year, we have done a standalone trip to my parents (as well as seeing them on the way to the in-laws), but we managed to take the train, rather than 200 miles round trip in the car.
I think we've made some progress on internalising not using the car and dwelling less on relative cost of trains/buses. What's the point being (marginally more) rich on a dead planet?
So well on track for targets upthread (no driving to work, <3000 car miles). But is it good enough? Still 0.7t CO2 to do 3000 miles even in a Yaris, but getting kids and stuff to in-laws is another level of public transport logistics, and quite limiting on doing stuff while there.
TLDR: Frustratingly trapped in the tyranny of car ownershipFood:Still somewhere between vegetarian and vegan (kids have more dairy, adults very little).
Trying to buy more organic and get more seasonal rather than lazy eating the same stuff year round without really paying attention to origin. Am more or less treating 'Western Europe' as a hard boundary and UK as a strong preference. Throws up some interesting questions about what is 'least harm' - organic spinach from Italy, or non-organic from within the UK? Then add in loose vs plastic wrapped to the mix.
In the last few weeks, we've acquired an allotment (not sure how much of a thing that is in US, so
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Allotment_(gardening)). Way more space than we have at home, so might eventually make a dent in food miles and food packaging.
TLDR: Going pretty wellDomestic energy:Not really made progress on this front. Do now have six months worth of regular readings, and some idea how our annual gas use breaks down into hot water vs space heating. Roughly:
- 2000kWh electric
- 2000kWh gas for hot water
- 8000kWh gas for space heating
Total gas use gives about 2t CO2 pa, so 0.4t water, 1.6t heat.
Notionally electric is 100% renewable, but the supplier isn't building any windfarms, so aside from a bit of demand stimulus we're basically just buying the clean bits of the same old UK energy mix and leaving the dirty bits for people on non-green tariffs. Honest assessment is probably 0.6t CO2 pa as the UK grid gets pretty dirty in the winter.
What to do, what to do?
Loft insulation upgrade, as per my original post, is a must-do before the heating comes on again. Don't think there's other easy wins on reducing usage.
I think the long-term answer is some combination of heat pump, heat storage, and solar PV.
Could easily fit enough solar on the roof to exceed current electricity usage over the course of a year, although would end up exporting a lot in summer and importing in winter and still using a lot of gas. Also involves designing a loft conversion we're not expecting to need to do for a decade and a bit of prework taking a chimney stack down and putting roof windows in now so we don't end up having to move panels.
Straight up swap of the gas boiler for an air-source heat pump is probably the right first step, but there's a bit of me that would quite like to get rid of the wet central heating (just for maintenance hassle/disaster potential), and investing in an ASHP would lock that in.
Phase change heat batteries are really interesting, and might be a good way of getting the hot water off gas while also fixing some non-environmental shortcomings of the system - ridiculous length of piping from boiler to any taps, plus start-up time of the boiler means a lot of water wasted waiting for it to get hot. But new tech/early adoption issues.
TLDR: Decision fatigueConsumption of stuff:Feels like too much, but not really tracking it well enough to figure out where it's going.
TDLR: Meh