“RIGHT now, your individual behaviour does matter,” says Chris Jones. “Anyone can go carbon-neutral today. Better yet, you’ll probably end up with more money in your pocket when you’re done.” Jones’s group, , Berkeley, provides an online carbon footprint calculator. , housing, food, goods and services for any household in the US. Other groups provide similar calculators for many other countries. Despite individual and local differences, some broad generalities emerge. “Globally, the three main contributors to greenhouse gas footprints are cars, coal and cows,” says Jones. And those three things are where individual choices can make the biggest difference.
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For most households, especially in the US, transportation claims the biggest share of carbon emissions, about 30 per cent of the total. Most of this is from fuel, so buying a more fuel-efficient car can shrink your carbon footprint dramatically, especially if you currently drive a gas-guzzler. The other big carbon source, especially for the affluent, is air travel. “One flight will probably blow your carbon budget out of the water,” says Stephen Cornelius, chief advisor for climate change at WWF-UK. Reducing air travel, by replacing business trips with teleconferencing for instance, can make a big difference. If you must fly, consider buying carbon offsets (see box) to balance the environmental impact of your flight.
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Whether you can wring similar savings by improving your home’s energy efficiency depends on where you live. In cold climates, better insulation can reduce the need to burn gas or oil for heat. But turning off lights, switching to LED bulbs and buying energy-efficient appliances only makes a difference if your electricity still comes from coal. If most of your electric power comes from renewable sources or nuclear plants, saving electricity has minimal effect on your carbon bottom line. In fact, the easiest way to green your home may be to buy your electricity from a renewable energy provider, says Jones.
One of the most effective places to reduce your carbon footprint is in the kitchen. Agriculture accounts for about a quarter of all greenhouse gas emissions, the vast majority from meat and dairy products. You can shrink your footprint dramatically simply by eating less meat, or none at all. The worst offender is beef, because cows belch large amounts of methane, a potent greenhouse gas. Chicken and pork avoid this problem, which may make them somewhat better choices, says Daniel Vennard of the World Resources Institute.
Because most households waste about a third of the food they buy – and because most affluent people eat more calories than they need – you can also reduce your food footprint simply by buying less and cooking it before it spoils. In contrast, buying local or organic food probably has very little effect, seeing as transportation makes up only a small fraction of emissions from agriculture, and the fact that organic farms generally have lower yields means more land must be ploughed, which releases carbon.
Anyone can take these steps today, and most of them actually cost less than the carbon-intensive behaviours they replace. According to Jones’s calculations, these and similar measures can save US households thousands of dollars per year, while halving their carbon footprint. The money saved should be enough to buy carbon offsets to cover the remaining part of the footprint, thus making your household completely carbon neutral. That’s a pretty good first step until government policies get more aggressive.
Carbon offsets
People or firms with large carbon footprints can compensate for their sins by paying for someone to reduce emissions elsewhere. These carbon offsets, if done well, can be a good way to cope with unavoidable emissions from air travel or other costly behaviours. But to make a difference, they must pay for reductions that would not have happened without them. Certification by international oversight organisation Gold Standard .
Offsets can be particularly helpful in mitigating the effect of air travel – easily the largest contributors to many people’s footprints. “We purchase Gold Standard offsets for all the business travel we do,” says Steve Kux, a climate policy analyst for the David Suzuki Foundation, an environmental group based in Canada.
This article appeared in print under the headline “Living with climate change: Can I make a difference?”
