Our decision to move to Costa Rica hinged primarily on a practical need, specifically gaps in my healthcare insurance. An equally compelling reason, however, was a restless feeling that had turned into a desire to make a total change in lifestyle and to learn something in the process about how people in a developing nation live. If reducing our carbon footprint crossed our mind, it was fleetingly at best.
As we've established a new, spartan lifestyle, however, curiosity about how the changes might be measured in green terms has begun niggling at me. So yesterday I set out to find the answer.
I quickly learned that most of the carbon footprint calculators on the Internet are designed for use in the U.S. With a little patience and persistence, though, I finally found one that lets you specify your country of residence. I plugged in Costa Rica and estimated our electricity consumption, based on the minimum usage bracket on the ICE website. (ICE is the Costa Rican government-owned electricity provider.) The number is clearly much, much higher than we currently use, but is intended to give us an idea about how our usage might look under more normal circumstances. Then I threw out what I thought would be a high number for the kilometers traveled by bus each year and even included one flight back to the States annually just to make sure I wasn't understating our case.
The resulting calculation shows that even when we ramp up our lifestyle with creature comforts like reading lamps and an oven, our CO2 emissions will register somewhere in the range of 10% of the typical resident of the U.S.
Our Individual Carbon Footprints
House 0.20 metric tons of CO2
Flights 0.69 metric tons of CO2
Car 0.00 metric tons of CO2
Bus & Rail 0.21 metric tons of CO2
Total = 1.10 metric tons of CO2
According to the EPA, the average emissions per person in the United States runs about about 20,750 pounds, or 10.3 tons.
The volume of trash we throw away has reduced dramatically, as well, now that we donate our fruit & vegetable waste to the compost and buy very little in the way of processed foods. Since arriving here almost four weeks, we have bought two cans of refried beans and two more of tuna. A small plastic jar of peanut butter will be repurposed when it's empty. Paper products are pricey, so we use them sparingly. As a result, we put out one 10-gallon trash bag for pickup 2x a week. Compare that to at least double that when we lived in Arizona.
So all in all, we're feeling pretty good about this one instance where the rule of unintended consequences actually benefits all of us.
To be certain, we aren't implying that everyone needs to live the way we do right now. It's extreme to say the least and temporary even for us. But if you would like to measure your carbon footprint and think about ways you might be able to reduce it, here are links to two different calculators.
http://www.carbonfootprint.com/calculator.aspx
http://www.epa.gov/climatechange/emissions/ind_calculator2.html
Pura Vida
