Western Tanager ©2004 Al MacKeigan

Bird Study Group - Nature Calgary activities and CO2 emissions

By Andrew Hart

Have you ever wondered how much CO2 our Society activities contribute to CO2 emissions, and what steps we could take to reduce those emissions? The thought has occurred to me when participating in Society car based field trips. On most of these trips there is some degree of carpooling, but often there is clearly room for more. Of course there can be many reasons for this, some people have to leave early.

Encouraged by our government’s apparent recent conversion to the green side I checked some data and did some calculations. First the data; a visit to http://www.eia.doe.gov/oiaf/1605/factors.html reveals a CO2 emission rate 19.564lb/gallon of motor gasoline, which translates to 2.64 kg/L for we metric Canadians. A typical birding trip (say to Banff, or Carseland/Frank Lake) probably averages 200km. Our typical vehicle probably consumes 10L/100km. So each car on the trip puts out about 50 kg of CO2, which is the amount we could save by carpooling enough to put one less car on the trip.

I did a quick count of car based field trips from newsletters for the past year and came up with 40. Which means that if we saved one car a trip we could reduce our emissions by 2000 kg/yr, half that and we conquer the one tonne challenge issued by Rick Mercer. Not much when compared to Canada’s Kyoto target of something over 300 Mt/year, but that target has to be achieved in many small bites, not just a few big ones.

Now it is possible that these field trips have already reduced our emissions because all those participants might have gone individually if Gus had not been able to bring us together. But we could reduce them some more. And remember, when you are moving through the country between stops, the more window side eyes in your car, the more birds you see.