Housing and Mobility Demands of Individual Households and their Life Cycle Assessment(Abstract, Dominik Saner, Niko Heeren, Boris Jäggi, Rashid A. Waraich, and Stefanie Hellweg, Environmental Science & Technology, May 6. 2013)
Also discussed here: 21 Percent of Homes Emit 50 Percent of CO2(Julia Whitty, MotherJones, Jun. 27, 2013)
Today we review estimates of CO2 emitted by the two largest sources in a medium-sized Swiss town: emissions from homes and vehicles. While it has long been known that these two sources account globally for 70% of greenhouse gas emissions, this research looks at grouping within the population and found that larger houses (which makes up about a fifth of the total) and drivers with longer commutes accounted for more than 50% of the total. This suggests that a focus on home and vehicle energy efficiency (or on smaller homes and shorter commutes) would produce the most effective results, to the extent that reducing the emissions of these two groups by 50% would reduce the overall total by 25%.
“The energy people use to power their homes and drive their lives accounts for more than 70 percent of CO2 emissions”
“on a midsized community, we found a median value of greenhouse gas emissions of 3.12 t CO2 equiv and a mean value of 4.30 t CO2 equiv per capita and year for housing and mobility.”
“Twenty-one percent of the households in the investigated region were responsible for 50% of the total greenhouse gas emissions, meaning that if their emissions could be halved the total emissions of the community would be reduced by 25%.”
”driving factors for large environmental footprints are demands of large living area heated by fossil energy carriers, as well as large demands of motorized private transportation.”
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