April 11, 2023

Our April emissions have increased from 4.8 tons of CO2e to the world average of 5.1 per person over the past couple of months.

This is largely due to a short flight to visit family at the end of March, and a cold past couple of months kept our furnace running longer than I wish it had. Our purchases of new stuff have been dropping now that some of the house renovation work is behind us.

Now that we've made our major gains we're hitting a bit of a wall where it's becoming harder to knock off those last 3 tons.

A neighbour recently got a Hyundai Ioniq EV. This makes sense for them as they drive quite a bit, but I think that our approach of being within walking/biking distance of our primary destinations will be more affordable and more effective than purchasing an EV ourselves for day-to-day stuff.

That said, the flight was a difficult choice and an EV could have been a decent alternative to flying. It was important that our daughter see her grandmother and the ICE-based driving and flight costs (money and CO2-wise) were fairly close so we decided to save ourselves some time by flying instead. If we had an EV we probably would've just waited until summer and driven.