The Tannoury Family Footprint

I wouldn’t ask anybody to do anything that I’m not willing to do myself and so I share with you below the Tanner/Khoury family footprint and the details of what went into it.

Results and basic thoughts

I like the fact that we’re 50% better but still 41 tons of CO2 a year sounds like a lot. I need to work through what that amount of carbon means for the planet. Our family obviously still has work to do.

I knew air travel was going to be a substantial piece but I hadn’t realized how much it would be compared to everything else. I want to go in and break the air travel apart to see how much which trips contributed.

The fact that our natural gas usage outpaced our car’s consumption was surprising to me. When I thought about this I thought that one of the most immediate things I should focus on was getting a heat pump to eliminate most of our dependence on natural gas.

Even though we try not to eat lots of meat it was interesting to see how much it still contributed.

Details of my own specific calculations

Travel Vehicle: I found the odometer reading of our car a Prius V when we first bought it and found the odometer reading now. I then looked up on the internet what a real world MPG was for our car. I then figured out how many miles on average we drove our car per year.

Air Travel: I knew that air travel was going to be a big impact and so I averaged our air travel over the past 4 years. I specifically wanted to include a trip that our family took to Europe back in 2017, but I’m also including 2020 when we hardly flew at all. I included my business trips. I looked at all the trips and all the travel legs taken and I worked out that over the 4 years our family flew

• 14 Short legs- These tended to be the short hops when we would fly to an east coast hub like Atlanta and then need the short hop to get to Greensboro

• 32 medium legs- These tended to be the flights up and down the west coast.

• 14 Long legs- These were our cross country flights.

• 10 Extended legs- These were the trips to Europe once for the whole family and then once for work for me.

I then divided by the 4 years and put in the fractional number of average legs flown per year. So for example 14 / 4 = 3.5 short legs into the calculator.

Home: I went back through our utility bills to determine the number of therms that we used over the course of the entire year. We also oversized our solar panel installation so that there’s no impact from electricity. Water is the one area where we seem to be consuming more than average but I don’t know why that would be.

Food: I kept a diary of all the meals that I ate for the week and assumed that it was roughly the same for everyone else in our household because they didn’t want to go through the exercise like I did.

Shopping: This was the most painful part of this exercise and if you want to approximate this part I totally understand. Luckily I had worked out what our budget had actually been over the past year in a spreadsheet and I went back over that budget and recategorized all those items into one of the climate calculator categories. They really didn’t seem to have enough categories to match up to our spending so this was only a rough approximation.

Deeper thoughts

Needs to be easier: It should be much easier to run this exercise on a day to day basis to see where you are at.

Poor Comparison: I really don’t like the comparison to your peers. It makes me feel too good and complacent about where I’m at. Of course people at a high income level are going to be consuming a lot which makes it easier for me to look good by comparison. Instead I want a metric related to where I should be for the sake of our atmosphere.

Shopping needs significant improvement: The entire exercise in the goods and services section was very vague and didn’t give me much confidence that it was an accurate reflection of my carbon impact in this arena.

Water Anomaly: If I’ve worked things out correctly, the one area in which we consume much more than average is water. This surprises me and I need to go back and double check this figure. I’m also curious as to how they get the carbon impact of water.