A-RockLeFrench wrote:I'd wager that a good majority of attendees are probably producing much more at home than at the event.
So, I drive a big ass truck to burning man, 318 miles there and back, but then it's parked for 12 days. But I also drive the same big ass truck around at home, in the country, its 30 miles to the closest town and in a busy work week I can easily drive a couple hundred miles or more.
En-route to playa my truck and trailer are packed full of camp infrastructure, a dozen or so bikes and supplies and h2o for a few campers who contribute to fuel, so that they in turn can drive a car with 4 people in it.
Then there's my appliances at home, heating, computer, lights, stereos and all the other crap that uses the electricity I buy from a power company. While on playa I sleep in the back of my truck, use one 12v battery for a bucket cooler and run an extension cord from the camps 2k Honda EU to power a couple strands of LED lights.
So yeah, I'd bet that my carbon footprint, along with most of my camp is smaller when I'm at Burning Man as opposed to at home using my kitchen aid to mix pate au choux to turn into churros in my elctric deep fat fryer.
Interesting point, if one is interested in the actual numbers. The only possible errors I see in your above assumption is that:
1. You aren't totally eliminating your energy consumption at home while you're at BM; some minimal energy is going towards maintenance (do you turn your air-conditioning, refrigerator, and water heater off entirely while you are gone? do you have security lights, a DVR recording your favorite programs while you are gone, etc.?). If there is still family at home, your home is still spewing nearly as much carbon as while you are still there. Note that, even when all the lights are off at your home, your electric meter is still counting up power consumption.
2. Even if you are using less total energy (between residual at home plus camp power) while you're at BM, what is the carbon output per kilowatt hour from your home electric company versus the little Honda generator? I would bet economies of scale make the big generators at the electric company more efficient regarding carbon output (even accounting for the electric company's work trucks as additional carbon load), especially if you're running the portable generator far below its rated capacity.
So are you really saving more net carbon while at BM? That's a very interesting question.
I know I won't be as efficient on vehicle-produced carbon for the drive to Burning Man, since my around-town car gets 30 mpg on gasoline and gets driven about 300 miles a week, and the RV gets 6 mpg on diesel with a 5000-mile round trip to BM (ignoring the extra diesel for the generator in camp) for 2 weeks that the car won't be used. Not sure I can stuff in enough carpoolers to spread out the RV's consumption enough to equal all our cars at home.
Considering the carbon being wasted in burn barrels and the like at BM, perhaps we should attach steam turbines to the burn barrels instead of using gasoline and diesel generators.
