Conservation comment: We can all do something to reduce our carbon footprint

When we fill up our cars, we don't always think of where that fuel comes from, or goes. Photo / Unsplash

OPINION:

Here is an amazing statistic. Every year, about 11,000 million tonnes of goods are transported around the world by ship. Of this, about 4500 million tonnes consist of coal, oil, gas and petrochemicals that will finish up being burned in power stations, cars and ships. So about 40 per cent of all cargo is fossil fuels of one type or another. A significant part of this total then goes into powering the ships and trucks carrying this carbon-based fuel, thus compounding the effect.

The huge company China Merchants Energy Shipping (CMES) has signed a contract for two huge tanker vessels. One of the new tankers will carry four huge sails. These are not like the sails you see in romantic paintings of tea clippers. The new sails have more in common with aircraft wings and are computer controlled to adopt the optimum configuration for the wind conditions.

Simulations and data from smaller vessels suggest the fuel consumption of this huge tanker could be reduced perhaps 10 per cent by the use of the sails.

It may seem ironic this technology is being used to reduce the fuel consumption of a fuel tanker, but the bottom line for the shipping company is their bottom line i.e. profit. Reducing the cost of running the tankers increases their profit margin, which keeps their shareholders happy. As a bonus, it puts less carbon into the atmosphere.

Can we learn from this?

Most school-day mornings, I drive my two grandchildren about 8km to where they are picked up by the school bus. The pickup point is the furthest the bus gets from town so it has travelled empty (apart from the driver) from town, which is about 20km. The bus then returns to town picking up kids on the way.

At the end of the day, the bus does the same trip and returns to town empty. I usually get to the pickup point about 10 minutes before the bus, and while waiting I will see perhaps 10 cars carrying only the driver go past on the way to work in town. Over a year the bus will travel about 7500km with no passengers while all of those cars do a similar journey again with no passengers.

I do not know how many rural school buses there are around Aotearoa, but I would guess that it is a similar tale with each along with a similar number of driver-only cars for each bus. That is a colossal amount of fuel being used for no good purpose. But look at the knock-on effects.

By integrating a carpooling app and getting some of those car drivers onto the school buses and paying a fare, everybody would save money. The fuel they would burn would not be burned. There would be a reduction in the fuel carried by sea and road-going tankers and so a reduction in the fuel they burn. The tankers themselves would put less carbon into the atmosphere. Putting sails on the tankers would reduce this further.

This is a mindset. The modern citizen simply sees what goes through their hands. When you fill up your car, you do not really see where the fuel comes from. It burns in the engine and disappears through the exhaust pipe so you do not see where it goes.

Let us try to be conscious of the fact that we are simply a link in a chain and what we do as a link affects all the other links in the chain.