Homework from FTP this week: calculate your carbon footprint. The suggested site (and since they all give different results, for the purposes of this thread use this one), is http://www.nature.org/initiatives/climatechange/calculator/.

Mine, largely because of flying to Australia the past summer, and generally flying to Hawaii each year, is 26 tons, while the U.S. Average is 27 tons, and the world average is 5.5 tons

AlexTD: 26 Tons
Jess M: 11 Tons

What's yours?

My carbon footprint was an 11. My goal: to reduce this number by driving less. Even though I don't use a car in Pittsburgh, I drive about 20 minutes to and from work multiple times a week when at home.

Does anyone know the logistics of converting a car to run on veggie oil? How much will it effect my carbon footprint? I am quite interested...

First and foremost, veggie oil is really best used in a diesel engine.
Running a car straight on vegetable oil requires a bunch of modification (significant for gas, less for diesel), and you have to monitor for quality - most of the waste vegetable oil requires a bunch of filtering, and doesn't combust as well. So - you can do it, but it's not good for the engine. Taking the WVO (waste vegetable oil) and processing it to biodiesel allows you to run it in a diesel engine with no modifications, depending on blend (as you run mostly Biodiesel, some engine changes are a good idea, if not absolutely necessary).

Do you run gas or diesel at home?

Oh wow, okay that makes sense. Thanks Alex. My car is a Subaru and runs on gas. So it won't run as well?

More that the changes necessary to let it run on vegetable oil are more extensive. It's possible regardless - but it does really bad things to your engine (like gumming up the oil and creating a lot of crud). If you were willing to change the oil and check the engine more frequently, you could probably get a system that would blend VO at some concentration (probably 10-20%) once the engine had warmed up. I'm not sure what the cost on that would be, or how you'd get a regular supply of oil (give me the rest of the semester and I may know these things - we're looking at some of them for class).

There aren't any particularly great gasoline substitutes yet - ethanol (1st and 2nd gen gas replacement) has a much lower energy density, so the miles per gallon goes down for gas that is essentially the same price (though in theory the carbon output is offset by the plants used to grow it - there are a variety of studies on the effectiveness of this). 3rd gen, green gasoline from things like algae, is a much more similar chemical compound, and should work much better, in both use phase and production phase. But that's a ways away.

Sorry to be depressing :-/. I must admit, for things like this (and a much higher base efficiency), I briefly looked at getting a diesel when i was getting a car at thanksgiving. But diesel's a whole other story.

In other news, I need to bug more people to start chatting on here.

Well that's a downer. Oh well, at least now I know. I won't be using my car much this summer anyway because I'll be in Pittsburgh.

So maybe by the time I graduate there will be some amazing breakthrough that will allow my lemon to produce 0 emissions...

And yes, we really need more people on this blog.