8
Carbon—
Quantifying and Reducing
Your Carbon Footprint

In the near future, enterprises of all sizes will need to consider and address their carbon footprints—the amount of carbon dioxide that they produce. This chapter provides a short explanation of the greenhouse warming effect and indicates how upcoming regulations are likely to affect corporations. Then you’ll learn how to determine what your carbon footprint is and how to reduce it cost-effectively.

The Greenhouse Warming Effect

The glass roof of a greenhouse allows visible light to travel through, where it is absorbed and becomes heat (infrared), but the glass does not transmit infrared heat, so the heat stays trapped in the greenhouse. Carbon dioxide and certain other gases in the earth’s atmosphere have a similar effect. They trap heat near the earth’s surface.

The gases that have been officially identified by the UN under the Kyoto Protocol as greenhouse gases are carbon dioxide, methane, and nitrous oxide, and certain fluorinated gases (CFCs) like Freon. Each molecule of methane traps 23 times as much heat as each molecule of carbon dioxide. Nitrous oxide traps 296 times as much. For CFCs, the numbers are even higher.

While the United States is not a signatory to the Kyoto Protocol and does not yet regulate carbon emissions, the Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) now requires public companies to disclose their greenhouse gas emissions. In the future, if you run a small to medium-sized company interested in doing business with a government agency, you may be required to disclose your climate risks through your operations. Minimizing your carbon footprint will become a competitive advantage. The trend indicates that regulation for all polluting emissions and releases is inevitable. Businesses will no longer be able to externalize costs and use the environment as a private profit center and dumping ground.

An August 2009 study of half of the S&P 500 companies found that, for example, chemical companies produce carbon emissions averaging 868 metric tons of CO₂ per million dollars in revenue. Based on the projection of $15 per metric ton of CO₂ in 2011 under the proposed cap and trade program and $26 per metric ton in 2019, chemical companies could have carbon costs of 5.5 percent of earnings in 2011 and 9.6 percent of earnings in 2019, with the range going up to 25 percent of EBITDA (earnings before interest, taxes, depreciation, and amortization) in 2019.¹

What You Can Do

One of this book’s themes is “if you can measure it, you can manage it.” So the first step in reducing your carbon footprint is to measure how much carbon dioxide you are currently producing. Every action your company takes, every bit of energy you expend, results in a corresponding emission or sequestration of carbon dioxide. Collectively, these emissions add up to your organization’s carbon footprint.

Measuring is how it all starts. Gary Hirshberg, CEO of Stonyfield Farm, is also board chair of Climate Counts.² Climate Counts uses a 0-to-100-point scale and twenty-two criteria to determine if companies have

• Measured their climate footprint

• Reduced their impact on global warming

• Supported progressive climate legislation

• Publicly disclosed their climate actions clearly and comprehensively

Several organizations,³ such as Carbon Concierge,⁴ use online tools for calculating your carbon footprint, or you can use the simple method explained in this chapter and resource G. Whichever method you choose, start calculating your carbon baseline by knowing your energy use. Chapter 7 and resource F contain information on how to measure and inventory energy use, expressed in terms of a fuel or energy source and how many million Btu you used. You can take those numbers and put them in column A of the carbon footprint calculator in resource G to calculate your carbon footprint.

Once you know your carbon footprint, you can balance it by paying “penance.” Your organization can buy carbon credits from organizations such as SocialCarbon,⁵ RainTrust Foundation,⁶ Cantor Fitzgerald,⁷ Element Markets,⁸ Evolution Markets,⁹ and others. Let’s be very clear about this: while almost every environmental solution listed in this book also has a bottom-line benefit to an organization, buying carbon offsets seems like it is just a cost without a direct benefit to the company.

A more thoughtful and rewarding approach could be to look more carefully at how you operate and consider making changes to actually reduce your carbon footprint (before paying penance for whatever you are unable to mitigate). For example, when Laury Hammel installed a cogeneration system at one of his Longfellow health clubs, he not only saved money but also saved 310 tons of carbon dioxide per year.

Some of the best ways to mitigate your carbon footprint are to plant trees in places where none exist, mine methane gas from landfills (and either flare it or use it to generate power), and dry and burn animal waste or decompose it in a way in which the methane it emits is captured and flared or used to generate power.

Consider other activities you engage in that produce carbon dioxide or other greenhouse warming gases. For example, the U.S. EPA Climate Leaders program notes that the 2 billion livestock in the United States significantly contribute to methane emissions. Does your business involve fermentation, animal husbandry, or manure management? If you have a dairy or hog farm, do you have any anaerobic lagoons or holding tanks? Do you own or operate a landfill or do you compost on your property? (Unless you are using an in-vessel static aerated composting system, most of the material you are composting is undergoing some sort of anaerobic decomposition. This results in the production of ammonia, volatile organic compounds, and methane in addition to carbon dioxide, which in this case is “carbon neutral.”)

For every ton wet weight of manure, wet organics, or similar material you have in an anaerobic lagoon, compost pile, or landfill, you may be producing methane at the equivalent global warming capacity of about ¼ ton of carbon dioxide.¹⁰ The methane can be captured, producing renewable energy and eliminating its carbon footprint, even with the inefficiency of most methane recapture efforts. If you own a landfill and are tapping the methane gas, you are probably losing to the environment four times as much methane as you are capturing.

Do you run a sewage or wastewater treatment plant? The methane you outgas should be captured and either flared or used to power something. Multiply the amount of methane gas you emit (in tons) into the atmosphere by 23. This is the equivalent CO₂ greenhouse warming effect of the methane. Do you use nitrous oxide as an anesthesia or as a propellant in aerosol cans? Multiply the amount of nitrous oxide you emit (in tons) by 296. This is the equivalent CO₂ greenhouse warming effect of the nitrous oxide.

Many other non-energy-related sources produce greenhouse warming gases. Once you know the total CO₂ equivalent that you produce, subtract the amount of carbon sequestration you are responsible for. For example, if you are growing crops and you switch from annual tilling to no-till agriculture, you are causing an average of 0.223 ton of carbon (0.816 ton of CO₂) to be sequestered per acre not tilled annually.¹¹

Carbon credits are being awarded for putting manure into a lined hole and flaring the methane gas that is emitted with, for example, up to 5 tons of carbon credits per cow-year.

Trees take in carbon dioxide, producing wood and oxygen, and can effectively store and sequester CO₂ If you allow them to grow for many decades, they become a carbon sink. Trees like loblolly pines, ponderosa pines, and black walnuts sequester between 5.5 and 17 tons of CO₂ per year after the first ten years.¹²

An existing tree does not accrue carbon gas credits. It is and has been already sequestering carbon dioxide and is part of the global CO₂ balance equation. What you get credits for—what truly mitigates atmospheric carbon dioxide—is if you change empty land into forestland by planting trees. Then you are increasing the amount of carbon that is sequestered, decreasing the amount of global carbon dioxide. Even if the land is currently in cultivation, the crop will be harvested and decompose, giving up within a short period of time (perhaps less than one year) the CO₂ that it sequestered during its growing cycle.

Almost twenty years ago, and well before the UN’s Kyoto Protocol was put into effect, Joe took a chemically contaminated urban site in Springfield, Massachusetts (the current location of CSRwire.com, Meadowbrook Lane Capital, the Gasoline Alley Foundation, and Social(k), among others), that was barren of life and planted hundreds of plants, trees, grasses, flowers, and cactus. Not only did they bioremediate the chemical contaminants but they also sequestered carbon dioxide.

Land that has been clear-cut and is not being replanted, urban land, and farmland that are converted to forestry are all candidates for carbon credits because they genuinely increased the amount of sequestered carbon dioxide. If a natural disaster (for example, a volcanic eruption, an avalanche, a flood, or a fire) strips an area of its trees, you can serve the planet and earn carbon credits to offset your carbon load by planting trees and leaving them to grow for a long period of time.

This is an activity you can do without a middleman. Simply buy land and plant trees. It you want to actually get tradable credits, however, you have to register your protocol with organizations like the Chicago Climate Exchange.¹³ If you plant black walnut trees, not only will you be sequestering carbon, but you will also be making your descendants rich. Black walnuts’ growth rate is about 39,000 board feet per acre per year (after the first five years). Black walnut logs sell at up to $8 per board foot (not to mention the nuts you can harvest and the dyes that some craftspeople make from walnut shells).

Mitigating Global Warming on a Grand Scale

In addition to the above approaches, some novel, large-scale schemes are being proposed and debated for carbon credits. Some certified greenhouse gas mitigation projects are silly because they neither genuinely reduce greenhouse gases nor reduce the earth’s temperature. Some of the proposed mitigation methodologies don’t actually sequester or neutralize greenhouse gases, but rather they reduce the solar energy the earth would receive, causing the earth to cool and thereby effectively offsetting the effects of carbon dioxide. One of these schemes involves putting mirrors into space to reflect away solar energy. A more cost-effective method is to inject sulfate into the stratosphere.¹⁴ Scientists know this method works because when volcanoes spew sulfate into the air, it has the effect of cooling. One way to do it is for giant earth-based canons to fire the sulfate up into the stratosphere. The sulfate could come from smokestack scrubbers from coal-burning power plants.

However, more down-to-earth possibilities exist. A group of respected scientists from Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory led by Hashem Akbari, an Iranian-born nuclear engineer, published a study in Climatic Change¹⁵—a peer-reviewed scientific journal—showing that the global warming effect from the CO₂ emissions of the world’s 600 million cars could be offset by painting all the roofs and roads in the tropical and semitropical regions white, thus reflecting sunlight back into space. The value of this in terms of carbon credits would be $1 trillion—more than the cost to buy and apply the white paint.

Small businesses can find large and small opportunities to be creative in mitigating CO₂. If you grow wood on existing forestland, harvest it, replant the trees with new trees, and store the wood in a way that ensures that it would not be burned or decomposed (for example, by building a giant wooden pyramid in the desert), you should qualify for certified carbon credits. If all the empty deep shaft coal and other mines were filled with sawdust, logs, char, and crop and forest waste and sealed (kept dry), that would have a huge impact on reducing CO₂ (and perhaps provide for bequeathing coal to our descendants 250 million years from now).

Summary

Global warming is real and will soon be regulated. Be proactive about your carbon emissions:

• Use the data from your energy audit and the carbon footprint calculator to determine your carbon footprint.

• Consider whether you want to reduce your carbon footprint by buying carbon credits.

• Mitigate the production of greenhouse gases by using renewable energy.

• Sequester carbon.

• Convert methane gas and nitrous oxide into other forms.

With preceding chapters dealing with all the measures needed to create a baseline of your current environmental status, the rest of the book deals with proactive engagement. The biggest impact your enterprise may have is not in what you do but what you buy. The next chapter deals with sustainable purchasing.