OT(sort of): Carbon Emissions While Caching

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OT(sort of): Carbon Emissions While Caching

Post by EcoTeam » 20 October 06 1:01 pm

Most of us drive our cars while caching, and for many that involves a LOT of driving. Actually I probably rank Geocaching as one of the top sports/hobbies that contribute to global warming through the carbon emissions from extensive use of our cars.

How about we all think about going "Carbon Neutral" for our caching activities and help reduce our impact on global warming?

If you are interested you can sign up here:
http://www.greenfleet.com.au/
It costs about $40/year for the average car to offset all of the carbon produced by your car, this is done by planting trees. No much money in the scheme of things considering some of us would spend thousands a year on petrol to go caching!

As a bonus, getting more trees planted makes for lots more bushland to go caching in :D

If you have no real idea what I'm talking about then go and see Al Gore's movie "An Inconvenient Truth". Actually, I'd say it compulsary viewing for everyone.

EcoDave :)

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Post by Aushiker » 20 October 06 1:41 pm

G'day

Interesting idea and I will check it out. BTW some of us actually walk or ride bikes to caches too :-)

For example have been on a two day backpacks caching, day hikes caching, have a two day backpack coming up, regularly walk or ride to local caches ... :-)

Andrew

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Post by Cached » 20 October 06 2:54 pm

Scouts around Australia plant trees every year with greenfleet - it's called Murray Darling Rescue.

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Post by CraigRat » 20 October 06 3:53 pm

I'm more concerned about my methane output whilst caching...
.

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Post by Derringer » 20 October 06 4:35 pm

We have planted 1500 trees on our property :D
That should keep us "in the green " for a while

Kevin

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Post by embi » 20 October 06 7:00 pm

I'll spend the $40 + more planting trees in my backyard over the next year.

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Re: OT(sort of): Carbon Emissions While Caching

Post by GIN51E » 20 October 06 9:05 pm

EcoTeam wrote:Most of us drive our cars while caching, and for many that involves a LOT of driving. Actually I probably rank Geocaching as one of the top sports/hobbies that contribute to global warming through the carbon emissions from extensive use of our cars.

How about we all think about going "Carbon Neutral" for our caching activities and help reduce our impact on global warming?


EcoDave :)
Geocaching also impacts by the destruction of plants caused by cacher trails :roll:

Although i'm getting LPG fitted at the end of the month so that makes it a little better, also means i can afford to do more caching which will then offset the positives for the environment :?

maybe it needs to be worked out to make it fair for everyone

Carby cars pay $80 a year, EFI Petrol $60 LPG $40 and Diesel $20 :lol:

I may pay the $40 in the future sometime I've made enough donations at the moment after giving a 'amount' to Wildlife Warriors http://www.wildlifewarriors.org.au/ is worth a look also, whats the point in stopping global warming if there isn't any animals left

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Post by Cached » 20 October 06 11:39 pm

We've just got LPG too, but I don't believe it's all that great for the environment though - a bit better, but not brilliant?

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Post by Bronze » 20 October 06 11:57 pm

I tell lots of people to plant trees. Get about 50 of them gathering around. Show 20 how to dig holes, 20 how to plant and 10 how to water them and hand them 300 trees at a time. I get away with supervising about four times a year. If they ask me to dig hole the phone rings and somebody is in labor somewhere that I have to leave to find out more about.

I'm all for carbon credits and it should start in literally our own backyards, public spaces and our natural environment. I commend proerty owners who take the time to plant on their properties. Often their is no requirement to but the benifits are fantastic, increased wild life like parrots, insect life, odors and pretty seasonal blooms as they mature and grow. Well done.

B.

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Post by Papa Bear_Left » 21 October 06 1:31 am

And write to your local MPs and their oppostions, telling them that you'll only support candidates who are prepared to stand up and be counted as proponents of alternative energy sources for Australia.

And then, if one of them does show a backbone, vote for 'em!

I feel sorry for the coalminers and powerstation workers, but not as sorry as I do for the rest of us!

As Al Gore has said, little old Australia could actually make a difference. If we signed Kyoto and started getting our act together, it'd leave the US as the ONLY non-signatory. And even they might start to feel uncomfortable in the solo limelight!

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Post by Geof » 23 October 06 4:04 pm

The other day David Suzuki was saying all this tree planting is only any good if the trees stay in the ground for at least 200 years.

Planting trees isn't the only thing you can do.
According to the USDA, growing crops for farm animals requires nearly half of the U.S. water supply and 80% of its agricultural land. Animals raised for food in the U.S. consume 90% of the soy crop, 80% of the corn crop, and 70% of its grain.
From http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Environmen ... etarianism

Another thing to consider.

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Post by Cached » 23 October 06 6:31 pm

From todays Crikey -
Planting trees: the answer to guilt free travel?
Date: Monday, 23 October 2006
Climate change correspondent Ian McHugh writes:
Tree planting schemes to "offset" carbon emissions offers guilt-free travel for those of us (like me!) with itchy feet. Or do they?

The idea is simple: if IÂ’m concerned about the carbon emissions associated with flying or driving, I pay somebody to plant or restore vegetation that theoretically fixes an equivalent quantity of carbon as it grows, thus offsetting increases in atmospheric carbon.

But there are inherent limits on the amount of biomass an ecosystem can support (and thus the quantity of carbon that can be sequestered), set by the availability of key resources like light, water and nutrients. Through competition between species to access these resources and the myriad of ecological niches they create to do so, nature maximises the allocation of carbon to ecosystems for a given set of resource constraints.

Absurdly, only because we have reduced terrestrial carbon storage through land clearance are our ecosystems available to sequester carbon. Tree planting and ecosystem restoration schemes – at best – can never pay back more than this historical land clearing carbon debt. In practice, even this is unlikely, since resource constraints on biological production have intensified – land has been degraded, soil carbon and nutrients lost, and much of the land surface appropriated for other purposes.

Done properly, these schemes may (for now) result in carbon "neutrality" insofar as an amount of carbon equivalent to that emitted through fossil fuel combustion is sequestered in biomass. But it is dangerous to view the two processes as being equivalent.

Since the accumulation of fossil carbon in geological reservoirs is a process that takes millions of years, its transfer to the atmosphere via fossil fuel combustion is effectively permanent. This is a genie that cannot be put back in the bottle over time scales of human relevance.

Imagine that we lived in a world in which ecosystems were intact, but fossil carbon emissions were the same. How would we offset them? For the most part we couldnÂ’t. We could always clear some land, but to then claim that the regrowth was sequestering carbon from fossil fuel emissions would seem like carbon accounting sleight-of-hand.

Tree planting schemes are immensely valuable in that they repay the land clearing carbon debt, and may have additional ecological and economic benefits. But they should be considered an adjunct to cuts in fossil fuel emissions, not an alternative.

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Post by EcoTeam » 23 October 06 6:47 pm

Cached wrote:From todays Crikey -

Tree planting schemes are immensely valuable in that they repay the land clearing carbon debt, and may have additional ecological and economic benefits. But they should be considered an adjunct to cuts in fossil fuel emissions, not an alternative.
That last sentence is the key, GreenFleet et.al it is NOT a solution or an alternative, but it's better than doing nothing.

The three best (and easiest) things you can do for the planet are:
1) Reduce your power consumption. (our insatiable appetite for energy is what has created this entire problem)
2) Switch to accredited Green Power and encourage others to do so.
3) Try to offset your car (and other like natural gas) emmisions by supporting programs like GreenFleet.

EcoDave :)

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Post by Cached » 24 October 06 4:41 pm

I agree completely - I've converted the car to gas, use solar hot water (the electricity is switched on only when necessary), use the fancy light bulbs, etc. I'm switching to green electricity and get lectures from the kids about the evils of fossil fuels (they teach them young!).

A good reply to yesterdays article in crikey - and another greenfleet-like provider to consider -
Ru Hartwell, Director of Treeflights.com, writes: Re. "Planting Trees: the answer to guilt free travel". I run a carbon offset treeplanting company --Treeflights.com. Because we all share the same atmosphere, air travellers use our service from all over the world, including occasionally Australia. We are often criticised because it is said that bio-sequestration of the type that we practise provides only a temporary store for the carbon that we withdraw from the air. This valid point is echoed in your article. Because of this we have given a lot of thought to this issue. We have come up with a future management plan for our young forests that goes like this... Grow the trees (all hardwoods) until mature(80-100 years), harvest into rectilinear blocks as large as possible, coat surface with preservative and then bury either in the peat that they are growing in or the sea. In these anaerobic conditions we believe that the inevitable flowback of CO2 to the atmosphere will be markedly slowed down. There are Viking longboats that have been brought to the surface in Britain after many hundreds of years and the timbers are pretty well preserved. The whole process is then repeated and in such a way one planting site can in theory be used as what we describe as a "Sequestration Farm" to re-absorb CO2 on an ongoing basis. The only way we will get on top of the problem of climate change is by learning to think in this very long term way.
Every tree is a good tree.

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Post by J_&_J » 24 October 06 7:28 pm

... Grow the trees (all hardwoods) until mature(80-100 years), harvest into rectilinear blocks as large as possible, coat surface with preservative and then bury either in the peat that they are growing in or the sea. In these anaerobic conditions we believe that the inevitable flowback of CO2 to the atmosphere will be markedly slowed down.
Thats fairly radical not to mention expensive. It's almost impossible to get a lot of old growth timbers that were freely available twenty years ago. The small amount available nearly costs the earth to acquire. I am sure in 80-100 years time the temptation to sell the lumber for an astronomical sum will far outweigh the desire to simply bury the timber. They better not let anyone know where it's buried or it won't stay in the ground long. With some exotic hardwoods fetching around $5,000 per cubic metre today, imagine what it would be worth a century from now.

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