How much carbon dioxide do we emit on our daily school run?

Every morning during the school year I drive Oliver from our house to Colonel Gray Senior High School, a distance of 1.74 km one-way.

Oliver sent me a link to Mission Emission this morning, a calculator for vehicle emissions, and I used it to determine the emissions from this daily school run, which it calculates are 537g of CO₂.

Doubling that–because I drive back home immediately afterward on the same route–gives me a figure of 1074g of CO₂ per day, or, over 180 school days, 193 kilograms of CO₂ per year.

If Oliver and I were to bicycle to school instead of driving, our daily impact would go from 1074g of CO₂ to 20g of CO₂, which is a dramatic decrease to 3.6 kilograms per year.

Walking to school would achieve a similar although slightly less impressive result, lowering our impact to 7.9 kilograms per year.

Of course, as with all discussions of emissions and climate change, the invisibility of CO₂ and the attendant difficulty in imagining what these numbers mean in real terms in our daily life is part of the challenge of behaviour modification: in this regard I found the recent IPCC report incredibly motivating, as it calls for net-zero by 2050, and net-zero emissions is something I can wrap my head around.

Moving from 193 kg of CO to 3.6 of kg is getting pretty close to net-zero: it’s a 98% reduction in emissions for our school run.