Carbon Footprint

At work today their was an attempt made to raise our awareness of the issues around climate changes, so I came home and decided to find out what my carbon footprint was like and I was surprised.

I kind of knew I would be bad in some sense. I often fly out to the USA so my carbon footprint will be higher for that. I was surprised by some things though.

Bestfootforward.com has a nice system that asks a few questions, and displays how many planets would be needed if everyone produced the amount of carbon you do. The depressing thing is I cannot make it go down to one earth. I take up 3.3 Earths or 11.1 tons according to this website. On this website if I were vegan I would produce 10.9 tons, but only take up 2.6 planets I think this is because being vegan takes 1.1 hectares less land (according to this website).

carbonfootprint.com also has a calculator which feels better as it asks for much more information, like flights you have been on in the last year and so on. This site tells me I produce 11.1 tons (again) and that just under 4 tons was produced by flying to San Francisco and Las Vegas this year. This was a bit of a shock to me. I knew it produced a lot, but given that global transport is supposed to be only 2% of carbon production it makes me wonder what produces everything else. This website thinks that becoming vegan would reduce my carbon footprint by a whole ton.

So what do I take from this? I guess I should stop flying places and stop eating meat.

Well until hell freezes over I guess I'll just do what everyone does and just keep on ignoring the issue, hoping someone else will fix it, and bitching that it is all George Bush's fault anyway.

Alasdair