Carbon Footprints

Carbon Footprints: Lending a Face to (and Eventually Unmasking) Global Warming

Some people find it hard to picture out the impact of their lifestyle decisions and consumption on the environment. Most often it takes a striking numeric value, a symbol or image of some sort to change all that. That’s what a carbon footprint is all about.

It is representation (and a reasonable representation, at that) of the impact human activities have on the environment as quantified in units of carbon dioxide. Yes, you read that right: carbon dioxide which is that dirty gunk in the atmosphere, and which en masse results to trapped heat that “warms” the planet, so to speak. To illustrate, two round-trip local flights a year means that the passenger contributes to the filling the air with about a ton of carbon dioxide per year.

As an aside, there’s also the conceptual idea of carbon offsets, the internationally-known proposal of making up and compensating for the carbon footprints of others. But for now, our focus is on the footprint. Countless carbon calculators are on the web, but I recommend that you visit either Zerofootprint.com’s country-adjusting One Minute Calculator or the Yahoo! Green Calculator. For the latter, I made a rough guess that our country’s temperature most closely matches the one of Florida, and that’s how I got my result.

First of all, I am an Internet marketing writer, and I live in a boarding house in Iloilo. Going to work, I take a 5-minute commute, but I prefer to walk home after work. I think it’s also a plus that I’m relatively not too keen on updating my wardrobe and gadgets that often (of which producing leads to carbon by-products). So my carbon footprint hovers between 2.37 (Zerofootprint.com) to 2.4 (Yahoo) tons of CO2 a year.

Yahoo.com has some cool tips how to help drive down our own share of carbon waste. Each of the following steps leads to an improvement indicated by lesser tons of CO2 /yr.

a) Carpool, take public transit, or telecommute one day per week instead o driving to work. Effect: less 0.88 tons of CO2/yr
b) Drive less aggressively- don't accelerate and brake rapidly. Effect: less 0.66 tons of CO2/yr
c) Take one less short domestic round trip flight this year. Effect: less 0.54 tons of CO2/yr
d) Drive at the speed limit. Effect: less 0.33 tons of CO2/yr
e) Drive 10 miles less per week. Effect: less 0.31 tons of CO2/yr
f) Replace a porch light hat's always on with a CFL bulb. Effect: less 0.30 tons CO2/y
g) Switch 3 lights that you use for 4 hours a day with CFL bulbs. This could save the world: 0.15 tons CO2/yr
h) Replace an old TV with an EnergyStar one. Effect: less 0.06 tons CO2/yr

The following has no direct impact on carbon emissions. But eventually these do discourage people from taking for granted stuff that contains carbon:

a) Replace 500 sheets of 0% recycled computer paper with 100% recycled paper.
b) Recycle all steel (in) cans in your garbage.
c) Unplug electronics when you're not using them.
d) Bring your own canvas bags to the store instead of using plastic and paper.
f) Buy locally grown foods. Effect: less 0.0, but it discourages spending on products shipped from abroad.

A Whimsical (but dead serious) take on Christmas Spending

A 2007 paper described the carbon footprint of Christmas in the UK and showed that using up food, travel, lighting and gifts for the holidays produces as much as 650 kg of carbon dioxide (CO2) emissions per person. The report put it more graphically by saying that total consumption and spending on food, travel, lighting and gifts over three days of festivities could result in emissions equal to the weight of some 1,000 Christmas puddings!

Sources:
Yahoo Energy
Gary Haq, Anne Owen, Elena Dawkins and John Barrett (2007). The Carbon Cost of Christmas. Stockholm Environment Institute Stockholm. Retrieved from http://www.climatetalk.org.uk/downloads/CarbonCostofChristmas2007.pdf