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Calculating your carbon footprint is useful in that the very
act of doing this raises awareness. Once you can put a
number upon your different activities then you know where
the biggest gains can be made - and at what cost. For
example, your air-miles will certainly stack up to a large
proportion of your personal allocation. You could sign up to
a renewable energy tariff tomorrow yet still find that it
makes an almost insignificant impact upon your footprint if
you take three foreign holidays a year. Knowledge is power.
It can be scary too. Mostly it is liberating. You have
nowhere to hide.
However, the
numbers are only really useful if you know:
Per person (in
the UK) we generate 12.5 tonnes of Carbon Dioxide. However,
that is measured upon the basis of total economic output. If
we focuses on OUR homes and personal transport then we are
individually only directly responsible for half of that -
about 6 tonnes. The rest is contributed from the manufacture
and provision of all the goods and services we consume.
Hence we are indirectly responsible for the other 6.5. Hence
we add it on top. As a basic rule of thumb we should
calculate our personal footprint and then double it.
The worst Carbon
Footprint in the World belongs to the citizens of the USA
which works out at nearly double that of the average UK
citizen. However the UK numbers are higher then several
European neighbours and grossly higher than almost any other
country on Earth (2.5 times the average)- including China!
It is claimed
that some online Calculators are misleading. Don't be put
off by this. Certainly the numbers used in the calculations
may differ slightly from source to source but you should not
find this to be significant. However there are alleged to be
several online calculators of CO2 emissions from Airline
Travel that use only the most basic numbers. You should know
that high flying aircraft produce a cocktail of Green House
Gases and water vapour at high altitude. Taken together this
means you must multiply the resulting CO2 footprint by 2.7
to get the equivalent Green House gas footprint.
The list of
resource we list (opposite) should be the best as
recommended by Ethical Consumer Magazine (EC109 - Nov/Dec
2007). Explore these and get started...... |
