My carbon footprint 19 December 06

Ever since I started working on my upcoming Carbon Counter book I have wanted to take a couple of hours out to calculate my own carbon footprint for the past year. Honesty is always the best policy, right? Well, the first copies just came through the post from the publishers (it's properly out in the shops next month), and I have requisitioned one in order to do the calculations. So what's the total?

Our domestic gas use at home produced 531 kg of CO2 per person – that’s about half the average for a small family home. It’s very low because we use a wood burner almost entirely for space heating, so the central heating is almost always turned off. For most of the year our southwest-facing conservatory also adds a lot of passive solar heat to the building (and we don’t use it at all in cold weather or at night, so it doesn’t lose heat from the house).

Our electricity is provided by Good Energy, which as far as I know is the only green tariff guaranteeing 100% renewable power. So there’s no carbon at all from this very major sector of energy use.

We don’t own a car, so the only car miles come from the occasional hire of a car to visit family and friends. (Trips within Oxford are almost entirely by bicycle, often with a child seat on the back.) This added up to 174 kg of CO2. More substantial was train travel, which we do a lot more of – particularly visits to Wales (where my parents live), in and out of London, and down to Cornwall on holiday. This adds up to 372 kg. Then there’s 18kg from the ferry to the Scillies and back (estimated roughly). I took no personal flights during the year (that doesn’t mean I didn’t go on a plane – see below for more on this).

Add 600kg for a very rough estimate for food and other consumption (using COIN’s figures). We’re probably about 30% self-sufficient in food which I grow on the allotment – pretty much everything else is bought from the neighbourhood farmers’ market, or in local shops (I haven’t been in a supermarket for years).

This brings my Grand Total to 1695kg, about a sixth of the UK average of approximately 9400kg.

But before I get too smug, there are a couple of major catches. The first is the issue of scalability – can I realistically advocate my lifestyle as a way forward for others? I worry particularly about the wood burner: if everyone was to use wood for heating, how rapidly would our remaining forests disappear? There would presumably also be problems regarding local pollution, particularly on cold, still nights when I can smell our smoke from a hundred metres away. If the entire country was burning wood, would we return fairly quickly to the days of pea-souper smogs with hundreds of deaths from lung disease?

There’s also scalability issues regarding green electricity. At the moment, there is enough renewable power for everyone who signs up to Good Energy to have their home power use covered. (Why don’t more people do it?) But if hundreds of thousands of people signed up, the demand would soon outstrip investment. There is also perhaps a theoretical limit to the amount of electricity that can be produced by renewables, particularly because of the intermittency issue. This might be 30% for wind, and about the same for solar and other sources. Still, at least using green power pushes market demand in the right direction.

The second, and more important, catch is that the total above is my personal carbon footprint. If I start including business and campaigning activities, then things begin to go rapidly downhill. I took flights last year to Lithuania, Sweden, the United States, and back from Prague (due to medical issues – we’d gone out by train, but my back got bad, and I had to be wheelchaired through the airport!). All of these were of course aimed at increasing climate change awareness: in Sweden, Lithuania and Prague I gave climate change lectures to audiences of several hundred, and also did a great deal of media work on TV, radio and newspapers. In the US I was meeting people from National Geographic, a relationship which has now blossomed – I have signed a contract for Six Degrees to become a major documentary on NG’s international TV channel.

These flights add up to about 8,700kg carbon impact, including a 3x multiplier to account for the effects of aviation on the high atmosphere (this is an issue not settled by science – some of the carbon offset companies include no multiplier at all). If you add this to my personal total above, the total including business activities would be 10,395kg, slightly above the UK national average.

So, am I a climate change hypocrite?

Well, all of this travel, I assume, outweighs in terms of awareness-raising the direct climatic impact of the flights. I cannot prove this of course, nor even begin to quantify it, but I do believe that more benefit is done to the climate – particularly with the urgency of the issue at present – by being prepared to travel and help raise its profile than to stay at home feeling pious. (There are alternatives – teleconferencing, for example, which I have also done, but I have found that these are no substitute for face to face interaction, and also do not raise any media interest like a visit does. I also travelled by train to Germany and – one-way – to Prague.)

That being said, I am hardly the only person to face this dilemma: Al Gore must have a pretty hefty ‘business’ carbon budget, and given the amazing international impact he has had with his talks and films, I feel every kg of carbon he has been responsible for has been more than ‘offset’ by societal change elsewhere. Likewise, scientists who need to fly over Antarctica or Greenland to study changes in the mass balance of the ice-cap are more than justified in doing so – again, I think the increase in our scientific understanding must outweigh the direct damage they are doing. It’s the old omelettes-eggs thing again, I guess (you can’t make an omelette without breaking eggs).

There is also a second issue regarding ‘business’ travel – I would not argue that employees of any organisation should be personally responsible in carbon footprint terms for emissions generated in the course of their work. You don’t add your office lights and electricity to your personal carbon footprint, nor do you add work-related flights. If we think in terms of carbon rationing, individual rations are for individual household use, not to keep one’s employer in business – they will have to buy their own carbon allocations to keep the company afloat. It is much more difficult for me as a self-employed person to draw the line, but if I have taken a flight at the behest of someone else – and have not paid for it – then I consider it not to have come out of my carbon ‘ration’ either. This seems like a reasonable way to divide it up.

Of course, all of this would be much easier to administrate if we had carbon rationing imposed and regulated nationally by the government. Then if someone wanted me to fly to Sweden to give a talk on climate change, they’d need to pay for both flights and carbon costs – and I wouldn’t be faced with this dilemma. Once there is an international ‘cap’ on carbon, we will have the certainty of knowing that carbon expenditure in one place will by definition by balanced by reductions in another. I cannot see any other reliable way to solve the climate change problem. It is this campaign which I am hoping to help succeed, of course. And I might add, that once the campaign is won, I will never step on a plane again!