Confused about Carbon?

Our role.
These days we are all being told that we need to reduce our impact on the environment and in particular that we need to reduce the amount of greenhouse gases that are emitted as a consequence of our actions. This is all very well, but how do we know how much greenhouse gases are being emitted as a consequence of our actions?

The facts.
Greenhouse gases are building up in the earth’s atmosphere because of the actions of all of us. Therefore, the most effective way to reduce the extent to which this occurs, is for all of us to move towards lifestyles that cause less greenhouse gases to be produced and emitted. Some of the changes we can make are easy to do. Some have the potential to enhance our lives and to save us money as well. Some are a little harder to enact, but in many cases, what is required is a change of mindset and of habit, rather than a terrible loss of lifestyle or liberty.

A good place to start.
We can get a good idea about some of the big stuff from resources such as the DEFRA carbon calculator which you can access from our \'Online calculator\' page. New Caledonian Woodlands would advise using this to get a rough guide of the scale of your annual greenhouse gas emissions. This calculator gives us a guide regarding how much we emit as a consequence of our travel and our home energy use. This is particularly useful information because it breaks down our total emissions into sub-categories in such a way that it highlights the amount of greenhouse gas emitted by different aspects of our daily lives. From this we might learn for example that by upgrading to an A++ rated fridge from our B rated one, we could reduce our emissions by 0.15 tonnes per year, or that by going to Europe on holiday by train instead of by plane, we could reduce our annual emissions by 1.2 tonnes per person (London to Madrid return). What is taking place therefore is a kind of auditing of our daily, monthly and annual activities and their environmental impact that allows us to make informed decisions.

What this calculator also makes clear is the scale of environmental impact deriving from different behaviours. While it is great for example, that Mr S Doo regularly recycles all of his glass, paper and tin, if he annually drive twice the average annual mileage in a vehicle that emits twice the national average in terms of CO2, his overall emissions are likely to be closer to the ‘villain’ end of the emissions continuum than to the ‘hero’ end. If we are serious about doing the right thing to protect our environment, we all need to reflect on how we impact on the environment, and we all need to be prepared to begin budget our greenhouse gas emissions and to make the necessary changes to reduce this impact. The good news is that it is not necessarily an onerous task – it simply requires us to take a measure of where we do emit greenhouse gases and then look at what we can change to reduce these emissions. Check out our ‘Reducing energy use in the home’ and ‘Reducing energy use of travel’ factsheets on our ‘Reduce your impact’ page for information and ideas.

What next - consumer behaviour and green habits.
It isn’t just our transport and our home energy use that contribute to our total figure for greenhouse gas emissions – there are lots of additional things that we do (or don’t do) that are just as important. For example, in the UK, it is estimated that producing, packaging, transporting and selling the food that we consume can be the cause of up to 20% of our annual greenhouse gas emissions. Consider all of the things that we buy in a year, from MP3s to mobile phones to clothes to foodstuff, and it becomes fairly clear that we can have a really large impact on our annual greenhouse emissions by being a smart consumer. Check out our ‘Smart consumer’ factsheet on our ‘Reduce your impact’ page for some tips, examples and some startling comparisons.

Government targets.
The Scottish Government has a stated aim to reduce greenhouse gas emissions by 50% by 2030 and by 80% by 2050. This is fairly dramatic stuff, but the reality is that changes of this magnitude are required if we are to avoid the worst effects of climate change. However, when we break these targets down, they don’t seem quite so scary – what we are looking at is a reduction of 20% per decade or 2% per annum. That seems a bit more manageable doesn’t it? To put this figure into some kind of perspective by using examples from elsewhere in this article, the 0.15 tonne saving per annum from upgrading to an A++ rated fridge represents a 1.5% CO2 reduction for the average UK resident. The travelling to Madrid by train rather than by plane represents an environmental hero’s CO2 reduction of 12%.

Before we all let of fireworks and celebrate the fact that we can save the planet simply by replacing our white goods or by making one less flight a year however, it needs to be stated that 2% per annum represents a minimum requirement – the more we reduce our emissions and the faster we do it, the less effect climate change will have. Also, it is important that we don’t lose our impressive greenhouse gas savings by doing new things that bring out total back up again. The reality is that climate change is already having an effect, and even if we stopped emitting greenhouse gases tomorrow, it would continue to have an effect for many years to come, because greenhouse gases remain in our atmosphere, sometimes for hundreds of years. So why don’t we aim for an annual 2% reduction for now, and once we have achieved that, raise our ambitions.

Budgeting our emissions.
We all have times in life when we let our financial budgeting go off the rails to some extent. Maybe it is a holiday that ended up being a bit more expensive than we had anticipated, or a house repair bill that we just didn’t see coming, or maybe it is an accumulation of little things over a longer period of time – too many bought sandwiches and cups of coffee when we know we should be making a packed lunch. When this happens, we usually adopt the same solution – we budget. We decide what our financial priorities are and what we can do without and we re-arrange how we spend our annual income. What is relevant here is that in doing this, our annual budget is broken down to fairly small scale stuff – for example, that coffee we like to buy each day on our way to work is only £1.10, but 5 days a week, 12 months a year, this equates to over £250 per year.

Our annual greenhouse gas emissions are similar to our financial expenditure – it is a lot when we total it up over a year (a lot more when we consider a lifetime of emissions), but many of the elements that make up our annual total are small, seemingly insignificant when considered in isolation. These thousands of elements are the building blocks of our annual greenhouse emissions. Why don’t you look at the building blocks for your environmental impact and divide them into five key categories – energy use at home, transport, consumer behaviour, biodiversity and recycling. Consider your behaviour in each of these categories and then consider what changes you could make this year to save your 2%. Then go ahead and do it!

Do it – be an environmental hero
The changes we make to these building blocks can be the difference between each of us being an environmental villain, or an environmental hero. Take a look at Jeremy Clarkson – would you rather be an environmental villain like him, or an environmental hero?

Posted: 25 Feb 2009