Gas, Green or Gone?

Chapter 2 – Gas, Green or Gone?



The conference is over and my mind has been altered whether I like it or not. I sit on the train, heading home and look at all of the cars motoring along. They remind me of my new desire – to know the facts about what my car is really doing to the world. I knew that it was not good, the question was how not good?

When in doubt, ask the Internet. Just remember to ask it a few different ways, check the sources and read more than the first search result….

This I did and the results all said pretty much the same thing. A car takes a bunch of energy to make and an entry in Google Answers reckoned the average is 70 – 75 Giga-Joules, we’re talking 70 billion Joules. Now according to the Canadian government 1 Giga-Joule equals the amount of energy contained in about 30 litres of petrol, so making a car uses around 2 100 litres of petrol worth of energy - if that makes it a bit more comprehensible. It also works out that the amount of energy used to manufacture a car is usually less than 10% of the energy it consumes in driving around during its lifetime, depending on how long the car lives of course.

OK, so my shiny, lovely, stylin’ car was not the planet’s best friend, what were the options? After a bunch more of research there were three viable choices; Convert to gas (LPG), sell the car and not drive anywhere, or get another car that was more eco-friendly.

The gas option is a pretty good one. Rebates for conversions are helping people chose this slightly-better-than-unleaded-fuel option (although the Australian Greenhouse Office reckons it’s only about 3% better in terms of carbon dioxide emissions). Also LPG is often burnt as a waste product of oil mining and it is a by-product of oil refining, so using something that could otherwise be wasted is always a good thing. Unfortunately though it is still taking Carbon molecules that were innocently locked away in the ground and pumps them into the atmosphere. So the verdict was: better but perhaps not best.

Sell the car and walk/cycle/public transport everywhere was another option. Great if you live in the city where there is some decent public transport infrastructure, no good if you live where I do. Cars cost a heap of cash when you add up insurance, registration, fuel and mechanical stuff, and when you're talking a 40+ year old car, you get to know your mechanic well enough to invite them to you BBQs – true story.

A 2006 study by the NRMA (http://www.mynrma.com.au/cps/rde/xchg/mynrma/hs.xsl/2856.htm?cpssessionid=SID-3F5768EC-B646E169) reckons that when you take into account all the costs of having a car it works out to be between $110 and $370 per week. Obviously little cheap-o hatchbacks that run on the smell of an oily rag are at the lower end of the scale and chunky 4WDs are at the other. Mine worked out around the $150 mark as depreciation was no longer an issue, in fact it was heading up in value due to collect-ability.

I guess the moral of the story here is; would you spend more than $110 bucks per week getting around in buses, trains and cabs?

So that left the option of finding a more eco-friendly car…. Bugger.



Tune in for Chapter 3 – The Cost of Going Green.

Deep Fried Cars

Life’s good. I’m sitting amongst my peers at a Sustainable Schools conference in NSW Australia and we are nutting out new approaches to the task of transforming schools into models of environmental excellence. It's been a good day and my brain is cooperating nicely with good attention spans and the odd idea worth noting. The afternoon rolls on and we are introduced to a guest speaker - Sue Lennox from OzGreen. Things are about to get complicated.

Now Sue is not your average Aussie chick, not any more. She tells us of her pleasantly conservative and safe past life, which turned a backflip worthy of a major party politician. She visited India, saw the state of their waterways and decided the best thing to do was sell her house and use the money to start a not-for-profit organization aimed at helping educate and restore India’s revered (and very seedy) rivers.

So how does this relate to running a van on waste vegetable oil? Patience, enjoy the story and trust that I’ll eventually get to that.

We are all sitting there thinking how comparitively we are all selfish and useless, when she asks for a volunteer to demonstrate a technique for identifying and working through problems, blockages and general bad stuff in your life. Of course everyone has a sudden attack of the “gee that's an interesting spot on the desk” and as the silence gets to the point of squirming I say, “yeah, I’ll have a go”. Being the youngest in the room I guess I have the least to lose.

So there I sit in middle of this boardroom at the head office of the Department of Environment & Conservation with forty or so top environmental educators and I am asked to start exploring my feelings… The only feeling I have is that of alarm. My cheeks and neck start blushing whilst my face does its best to suggest that really everything is mostly OK and I am not really really really nervous all of a sudden.

Sue asks me to relax (Hah!) and try to think of one issue in my life that is troubling me. I ask her if the present situation counts and that cheesy joke helps me and everyone else loosen up. So I attempt to follow her instructions and into my head comes a dreaded thought – my car, Bek. My beautiful, shiny, stylish 1961 EK Holden Station Wagon, which I’d spent months restoring. Bek is so chromed, so retro and so not fuel-efficient.

I had tried justifying Bek with arguments of embodied energy and conservation of materials but deep down I knew I was clutching at straws. Before I could stop myself, out it came, the tussle between being an environmentally aware person and wanting to keep that bright, shiny object. Sue listened and asked me how I felt about that.

Then she asked me to describe not only the feeling but where it sat in my body. The best description I could give was that sinking feeling in the pit of your stomach, when you know something bad has happened or is about to. That was the low point.

Sue let it sit for a while and then asked me what I could do to change the situation. Just one action, one little thing you can do to start heading away from sinking stomachs and moving towards a smile. I thought of various options yet they all ended in me parting ways from my beloved chariot in the near future, until I realised that what I really needed to do was to get all of the facts together. Figures had to be compiled from a bunch of sources, data collected and the lords of the Internet consulted. I had a plan....

I was allowed to leave the seat of self persecution and return to the safety of my colleagues.