Building understanding of per-capita emissions by tracking our own. Family carbon audit for 2024.

Takeaways

2023 emissions were about 8.54 tonnes of CO2-equivalent, up slightly from prior year.

Here is a breakdown of how 2024 compared to prior years:

Good

Not much

Bad

Now we’re crab-walking :/

At the time I’m writing this in 2025, there’s some additional improvement in that we’ve sold off our last gasoline vehicle, the pickup we used to build the cabin with and drove in the summers. Next year that should mean that the “car” section is zero, because it’s all counted in the “electric” category instead. That’s of course cheating in that it doesn’t count the materials etc that’s gone into making the vehicle we’re driving; my plan has been to do a more fine-grained model once we get the giant chunks of emissions down.

We didn’t make any headway on food emissions, still eat mostly the same way.

I did spend a lot of time trying to find a way to visit family in the US in the summer without fossil kerosene, with no luck so far. There’s some airlines talking about it kinda, but it all seems to be bio-based versions, which I suspect are at least as bad (from land use change) as digging up oil.

Maybe we can get somewhat there by doing a shorter route? Today we fly a roundtrip from CPH -> STL, which lands around 3.2tCO2e total for the three of us.

Two alternatives we’ve considered are:

  • Take the train to Frankfurt and fly nonstop to STL.. but that’s still 2.9tCO2e, minimal difference
  • Fly shorter route, like to NY or Boston, and drive electric from there? That would actually cut a tonne out, bringing us to 2.1tCO2e?

The trouble with the latter option is that it adds four additional travel days (two 8-hour driving days each direction from NY to MO). Relative to the number of days of vacation we have, that’s a large chunk, nearly a week. I’m really struggling with the tradeoff there, which I feel a lot of shame for.

Why do I struggle with that tradeoff?

  • Have my kid spend 4 days of his summer vacation on a roadtrip to cut out 1tCO2e
  • Get 4 days of extra vacation but “take it out of” my kids future

When you spell it out like that it really doesn’t seem like a difficult choice; why would I do anything that adds to the work his generation will need to do to clean this mess up?

Lets see. I’m writing this in the autumn of 2025, so we’ve already done our summer trip this year, but perhaps next year we should try it one time and see how it feels.

Actions

  • Go over our food again and think through what we can do with our diets - less dairy?
  • Keep looking for electrofuel flights
  • Consider trying the shorter route in 2026

Methodology

Same as in 2018