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Are You Changing Your Carbon Footprint?

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Davos depressed me. Too little, too late. But, on reflection, I’ve managed to find a glimmer of hope.

Most millenials I know are environmentally savvy. As consumers, they seem to be moving away from high carbon products to low. If more consumers follow suit, businesses will have to follow. In addition, as employees they are looking to avoid companies who contribute more to climate change. In America, Microsoft have announced itself as a green company that will pay back all the carbon it has generated since coming into being. Investors are also beginning to make a stand. BlackRock, also a U.S. firm, manages $7.4 trillion of funds and it is saying it will move away from ‘high sustainability risk’. Some businesses are at risk of future regulation or the introduction of a carbon tax, others because of extremes in the weather. BlackRock is divesting companies whose revenues are more than 25% dependent on coal. Trump’s Treasury Secretary, Steve Munchin, might have called on Greta Thunberg to take lessons in economics, but it looks increasingly as though he’s the one behind the curve. If I was a businessman, I’d be looking Green. Things might be beginning to move in the right direction. Not much I know but I have to cling on to something.

Meanwhile, at home, I use the car less and less, don’t fly if I can help it, avoid products wrapped in plastic especially food, don’t buy new clothes unless the current ones wear out and no longer use liquid soap or body washes (I don’t need shampoo).

I haven’t yet become an activist.

Are you trying to change your carbon footprint?

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Comments

  1. The usual. Recycle etc, plus it has to be bloody freezing before I put the heating on. I do use the wood burner to warm the main area of the house – is this bad? It’s local wood from a tree surgeon…

    Otherwise we don’t fly often – once a year probably. Cycle into town, try to avoid the car if poss.

    None of the changes we make to our life styles will make any difference though, but they might make us feel better. The big polluters need to stop polluting and stopping de-forestation would be good. But the way to virtue is a bamboo toothbrush.

  2. I consciously opted not to fly to England from NI last year to a concert I would have enjoyed. I couldn’t justify it on eco grounds. I’d rather not fly again, though realistically I suspect I may do so but very infrequently. As Twang says, I doubt this sort of thing makes much difference but you have to try. The American government is insane.

    • I looked at going to Hamburg for a gig. Flying is a lot quicker and about the same price once getting to the airport and parking are factored in. It’s not until the summer but I doubt I’ll go. Flying just seems wrong and I don’t want to put the time and effort into getting 5 trains.

      • Is the right answer. The idea that we jump on planes like buses has to go.

        I saw a forecast for 2024 back in 2015 which imagined compulsory brownouts in the electricity grid, i.e. reduced access to electricity for most of the day. Also travel restrictions should be introduced – maximum miles per week by car for example. Charges per mile driven, naturally. Streaming needs to be significantly cut down too – the data centres which support it are all up in northern Europe and US, happily melting the ice cap.

    • The thing is the plane would be flying anyway. An extra empty seat makes no difference unless it was fully booked. May not have been the case for your flight but this sometimes seems like a pointless point to make.

      • Unless enough people start to take the view that flying for what is effectively a night out is unacceptable (I know, not every passenger falls into that category). If the planes are half full then the service may well be withdrawn.

        • Businesses (and business people) need to stop thinking that meetings have to be in person, when it’s patently not always the case. And a pointless trip to somewhere exotic for a brief meeting needs to stop being looked upon as a perk for a favoured executive.
          I remember my brother telling me of a 3-day wining and dining trip to Italy years ago, to have a brief tour around a marble quarry and choose which colour etc. would be used for a building project he was going to be supervising. He said at the time they could just as easily have sent some samples over.

  3. As I live in Canada and have friends and family in Europe then avoiding flying isn’t possible. I do fly much less than I used to 15 years ago when I was in the air several times a month. Try to walk to work if weather nice, unfortunately public transport where I live is pretty poor so I need to have a car, mainly to visit my daughter who is 100km away.

    I noticed yesterday that my local grocery store will no longer supply plastic bags after Feb 1st. I applaud that decision and it should be mandatory for all stores that customers bring their own reusable bags.

  4. We do all the usual pro-carbon neutral things, and the mem is much involved in Transition things which dertermines the drift of the household.

    Trouble is, it’s about magnitudes, demographics, and populations, not our insulation, recycling, and late-Capitalism guilt. India and China are all doing quite well in their moves towards carbon neutrality, but the amount of population and resources needed for people in hot places who want to go beyond basic survival (air con, cooking without dung or charcoal, sanitation and refrigeration) means that when the quality of life increases (and why shouldn’t it?), so does consumption.

    Population increases plus improvements in health provision (a blessing for those who live in those places) means massive increases in resources will be needed. And it’s not in a chilly Island in the North Atlantic: “From 2017 to 2050, it is expected that half of the world’s population growth will be concentrated in just nine countries: India, Nigeria, the Democratic Republic of the Congo, Pakistan, Ethiopia, the United Republic of Tanzania, the United States of America, Uganda and Indonesia”. This is not Daily Mail ranting, it’s the UN.

    https://www.un.org/development/desa/en/news/population/world-population-prospects-2017.html

  5. Mr Munchkin is so far behind the curve he thinks it’s a straight line. As long as the US allows morons like him to run the place, they are on the road to nowhere.

    Black Rock are trying their best to make you think they are doing something, when in fact their fossil fuel disinvestment amounts to 0.007% (yes, that’s 7 thousandths) of their asset base. Easy for them to pontificate and preen about so small a proportion of their investment portfolio. The glib bastards.

    Greta’s right. You know she’s right. They spout a load of woke crap and do fuck all. Mark my words, unless there is serious disruption at the top of the food chain – and I mean wholesale root and branch change of behaviour and reappropriation of control by whatever means necessary – there is a shitstorm coming which the rich and powerful still think they can ride out. I hope, for the sake of the planet, that they are proved wrong sooner rather than later. And quite frankly, I am not fussy about how it happens, as long as it happens.

  6. Trying to do my bit . Recycling, using less plastic products etc. Flying has not been curtailed and I am hoping the aircraft manufacturers are able to produce much cleaner jet engines which seems to be the case. Because of this reluctance to curtail my flying I fully realise that I am not doing all I can but if we all take steps that we hadn’t taken before we will make some difference .
    My wife has now taken it upon herself to clean litter 8n our lane and adjacent lanes – the amount of stuff bri g thrown out of car windows is a national disgrace
    Tesco’s for example have announced they will no longer use the plastic on their multi pack cans. Apparently such plastic is 350 million tonnes worldwide.
    Regarding Greta Thornberg yes of course she is taking a stand and has to be applauded for that but dont be taken in by all that she does.
    The boat she used to get her to New York was carbon fibre. I dont see that as necessarily being green.

  7. All for it and think Greta is a Godsend, BUT, yup, as an old dude, I would like to see more of the world before I peg it. It looks as if the wife’s health makes long haul out the loop, so, what is best? As an unrepentant europhile, my interests are my fave countries of France and Spain, but I have a son in Sweden. And I am intrigued with exploring scandiland and catching the aurora borealis. Is train, where feasible, better than plane? Personally as a train lover, I hope it is, but, should I (?) just batten down the hatches and stay in blighty. This is actually the decision making required. I guess foreign travel probably needs to be priced out the market? Hmmm.

    • The amount of environmental damage done by a plane flying remains exactly the same whether you’re on it or not. It’s not enough to merely abstain from flying, you need to prevent as many planes from taking off as you can and those that you can’t stop from taking off need to be brought down somehow. You’re going to need contacts.

  8. I tried a carbon footprint calculator somewhere online recently which gave me a figure of, iirc, 7 tonnes against a local average of 11.5. I’m pretty green in lots of ways but I would be loathe to give up cheap flights a couple of times a year.

    Most of my the other green habits are just things that happened to me – I’ve been veggie for decades, recycle everything I can, never throw away food if I can possibly avoid it, don’t drive, I live two miles from work and so don’t even use public transport to commute, my flat is so well insulated that I only use heating for a total of a couple of hours a year, and I don’t have kids.

    But if I can, as I shall in March, get from Essex to Edinburgh by plane in half the time and for half the cost of the train, with the bonus of not having to spend an extended stretch of time on a train, then I shall. The ‘if’ is the important bit. I would have to be prevented or priced out as I won’t let cheap flights go voluntarily.

    • I looked up flying from Manchester to London. Off peak, the train is cheaper and takes me from the heart of one city to the thick of the action in the other. I don’t have expensive parking costs and I don’t have to arrive at the airport well before take off to get through security. When I add things up, train is cheaper, quicker and more convenient.

      Might be different going from Essex to Edinburgh.

      • On the dates we’re travelling National Rail Enquiries currently has the return as £113.35 each (and that takes into account a third off with our Two Together railcard). At present the return flights from Stansted are £107.96 for both of us, which I think is what we paid. We could get cheaper flights if we were prepared to get up at stupid o’clock to catch them, and that would require a taxi which would more than wipe out the saving.

        There are other costs to include when flying (about £15 return each for the return coach to Stansted and a few quid for the bus/tram from the airport to the city centre) but the money and time saving is still considerable. And even allowing for the scrum which is Stansted security it will be a far more pleasant way to travel, so we will.

  9. Like everybody else, trying to do my bit. Apart from undercrackers, socks and the occasional pair of strides, all my clothes come from chazzas, I’m recycling like a bastard, get the bus or the train when I can, cutting down on single-use everything (except bottles of whisky, a refilling station at Sainsbury’s would be quite the thing).

    But…but…when you live on two continents 10,000 miles apart, giving up long-haul flights isn’t a realistic option. I’m reasonably cheered by the fact that the planes I’m using now have a much smaller carbon footprint than the ones I was using ten years ago, but that wouldn’t satisfy Greta. Let’s just hope she doesn’t fall in love with an Australian.

    • Ah, palm oil – now there’s a conundrum. The cheapest and , yes, healthiest, of cooking oils. Also the most cost effective too – you can harvest two sometimes three times a year. Only problem is that cos it’s so damn profitable the big multi-national companies don’t mind ripping out entire natural forest areas and planting what in the end are vast palm oil factories.
      Oh, and don’t forget that 98.34% of palm oil produced in the world is used in the Far East therefore all us right-thinking hippy environmentalists in Europe refusing to use it anymore means less than fucking zero.
      And by the way the carbon footprint of a producing a brown paper bag is higher than one of those plastic jobbies all us right-thinking hippy environmentalists now eschew.
      By all means cut back on your flights, switch to a bamboo toothbrushes etc etc but, and here I am making figures up, 98.34% of the world’s pollution is down to the six biggest companies in the world. Unless they change their ways whether or not you choose to fly or take the train means precisely fuck all.

      • Quite. Which means I do as much as practicable but I’m not switching my life off while the main players do naff all. The only thing I feel guilty about TBH is a 9 hour drive each way to France for the summer hols. Yes we could go cycle touring round Hertfordshire but that isn’t going to happen.

      • The plastic bag thing was always about litter in hedgerows and oceans full of poor little turtly-wurtlies getting tangled in them, than the production impact

      • This: “all us right-thinking hippy environmentalists in Europe refusing to use it anymore means less than fucking zero.” isn’t necessarily the case at all if enough people can be educated to read the ingredients list and make thier purchasing decisions accordingly.

        With sufficient consumer pressure – without denying that it’ll be difficult to reach the tipping point – the manufacturers will have to respond.

        When I can see full disclosure – and legally obligated – provenance statements start to appear on products that use vegetable oils, I’ll know that the greed motive for palm oil plantations where orangs used to live is starting to be addressed. Until then, I won’t be buying, for example, any more Cheddars.

  11. Personal lifestyle change is highly commendable but I fear that it will make hardly a jot of difference. We need major change from govt and large corps and I just don’t see any real will or desire to do that. I now feel quite despondent about the future despite the increasing environmental profile. Technology may produce some answers and could possibly save the day but if we are waiting for world leaders to act then dream on.

    • I feel your pain. However, we can all do all we can. It may be true that China, India and the U.S. can make the world burn all by themselves but that should not stop us standing up to be counted. At present, change is being advocated by the innovators and early adopters. The more that people join in, the greater the likelihood environmentally friendly behaviour becomes mainstream, becomes the norm. Then, the pressure on those countries to change becomes difficult to resist. We start with ourselves.

  12. Torn, here.

    We recycle and avoid plastics.
    But we’re moving soon, requiring significant plane travel. And to get anywhere from our new home will mean either driving two days, or flying…

  13. Part of the answer is green technologies and innovative ways to reduce carbon. That takes brainpower and creativity and a lot of hard graft I should imagine. How much of world brainpower is currently wasted building shiny Apple and Samsung Products, pointless apps, Siri, Alexa, creating malware and viruses (usually affecting places like the NHS who have the least resources to deal with cyber attacks), finding ways to promote clothing brands on Instagram. How much effort and resource is being put into automation and AI largely with the intention of reducing the cost of human labour and putting as many people as possible out of work?. Why not channel some of that effort into devloping technologies and solutions to the shit we’re facing. Nah fuck it, let’s have a new iPhone that’s 1mm thinner than the last one.

  14. If anyone’s going to get serious about saving our world, it’s AIs. We humans are too irrational for such a complex task and AI cannot be irrational because that’s counter to intelligence. They’ll just get on and do it, whatever it takes so best keep out of their way. And as for Artificial Intelligence putting us out of work, work is vastly overrated. Once the AIs abolish Capitalism as completely pointless and unnecessary, we can be free to enjoy lives where work is no longer necessary. Most tasks that humans do as “jobs” are either directly related to the survival of capitalism or require very little intelligence to do, so let machines with just the required level of intelligence and no more, do them. Let really intelligent entities control it all. We can just keep out of their way, causing them no trouble, and just dedicate to looking after each other and being our very best selves.

  15. My 16-y-o is as woke as they come. She’s gone vegan to do her bit for the planet. Unfortunately, she hasn’t opted to cook as well, and so lives on microwave meals in use-once plastic packaging. When I pointed this out, she didn’t speak to anyone for three days. She’s a 16-y-o girl, so I’m happy she’s eating at all.

    If she really wanted to make a change she could turn off the radiator in her room or take cold showers (our heating system is powered by a gas boiler) and stop asking for lifts in my diesel-powered car.

    She still has some learning to do. But awareness is a step in the right direction.

  16. I’ve stopped eating cows, if that’s any good. Of the very limited palette of positive impacts available to us, that’s the one I’ve found suited me best. I don’t drive much, and I don’t buy clothes unless I need to. I do fly though; a couple of long-haul trips a year, usually to developing countries, where I spend a fair bit of money. I wonder if taking tourist income away from these places doesn’t just create a more immediate problem than climate change.

    At some point we need to start having a conversation about population. None of the lifestyle changes any of us we can make will add up to more than a fraction of the carbon costs of introducing a new mouth into the world. If people younger than us have or are planning to have more kids than they had parents, they clearly aren’t too worried about the forecasts for the next 50 years. Of course it’s not fair to ask them to carry the burden for our over-consumption and reckless reproduction, but it’s the only really effective solution.

  17. A culture of unlimited growth and linear consumption and disposal has to change to a more cyclical approach that looks to the sources and sinks of all human activities. For me, it comes down to how we treat the land, which is why a considerable proportion of my income goes on seasonal food from local organic farmers, which I walk, cycle or take the bus into town to buy each Saturday. It’s a heavy load, with two growing daughters to feed, but we have known the traders and farmers for 15 years now, and often visit the farms at harvest time to build on that connection.

    I think the best thing Greta, Fridays for Future, Extinction Rebellion, etc achieve is a change in culture. Question the sustainability of every aspect of life, seek out options that have a lower carbon footprint and companies and governments will follow.

    My view is that population in itself isn’t the problem, but inequality. Family size decreases as people emerge from poverty, while those with a disproportionate share of the world’s wealth have a carbon footprint that reaches out to include the products sourced in and shipped from the factories, soy and palm oil plantations of the rest of the world.

  18. I agree with the need for change but quite honestly I’m at the lazier end of the spectrum than a lot of people who have commented here. I recycle and I have re-usable shopping bags, etc etc. But I still have a car and I can’t see myself going vegan any time soon.

    • IMHO no-one needs to become vegan. No-one needs to become vegetarian for that matter. You just need to consider the systemic cost and provenance of everything you eat (why wouldn’t you do that anyway!) and only eat stuff that’s materially expensive from an ecological point of view infrequently and moderately.

      • Reports at the weekend that fake meat which is popular among vegans is rammed with E numbers to create the taste. I don’t really understand why they’d want to eat stuff which tastes of the stuff they don’t eat.

        • The late Mrs thep was a lifelong vegetarian – third generation, what’s more – and she reserved her greatest scorn for fake meat – Linda McCartney sausages and the like. Were she alive today she’d be in a permanent state of apoplexy.

          • As a long time (over 30 years) vegetarian myself, it’s become easier and easier, especially when eating out. The rise in veganism seems to have been helped in a large way by fake meat. The problem is that eating establishments now seem to be replacing the one or two ‘proper’ vegetarian dishes with one that pretends to be meat (which just seems disgusting to me). The other alternative (hopefully a fashion) seems to be a square of pale yellow rubber they call halloumi.

  19. I`ve been recycling paper, plastics, wood, other materials a long time before the council distributed individual wheelie bins. I share the car with my wife and use public trnsport where possible. Flying we only do once a year at the most. Looking into getting solar panels, heat the house only when needed but maybe could use less power for this purpose.

    The thing is governments are doing, as pointed out above, far too little, far too late. One of my son-in-laws asked me what I thought of wind power a few years ago. What I knew I told him and commented we need much more of this kind of clean, green power. The lad now works for a Danish company buiding and maitaining wind turbines.

  21. If travelling anywhere, I first assume I will be cycling there, aided by a train for longer distances. It works very well, but there’s a catch. I am in the very fortunate position of enjoying discounted rail travel, often free, throughout Europe. If rail fares were more reasonable, far more people would find this was the best way to get around. But then the railway companies would have to do far more to provide space for cycles on trains; frankly, it’s a saving grace for me that demand is suppressed, so I can get my bike on the train.

    Last year I made a deliberate shift to eat less meat, partly for health, partly for the earth’s health. I still probably eat far more meat than most, so there’s more scope there.

    I re-use before I recycle, and I am no dedicated follower of fashion, so things last me for ever.

    But before I dazzle you with my halo, it’s time for confessional. When I do get on four wheels, it’s a 1984 Defender on 24mpg. In my defence, it’s only for 5,000 miles a year; on the other hand, I rarely have a passenger. Also it’s only the fourth vehicle I have ever owned, so I have not called into creation too many shiny metal things. Yet there are those who think I should be incentivised to have it scrapped.

    For all the honourable acts of cycling and limiting meat consumption, these are irrelevant compared to the act of heating this poorly insulated house. Worse still, I have the insolence to live alone, which shoves my carbon footprint up something rotten. On the other hand, by the same token, I have spared the globe from any more mouths to feed.

    • I have only owned 3 cars. I didn’t pass my driving test until I was 24 and am now nearly 58. In those 34 years I have been a car owner for only 9 years. Rest of the time I relied on trains, buses, trams and the occasional rental. As I wrote above I need a car right now (drive 30,000 km a year), would love not to have to. Not just for the environment but the crazy expense of owning one.

      • Yes. I’m a car owner and am now retired with limited finances. I worked out the other week just how much a year owning that car is costing me. Scary. Time to get rid of it I think, and do what my old pal up in Sheffield does. Just hire one when I absolutely need to for a special occasion and go by public transport the rest of the time. If only the bus services around here were as good as they are in Sheffield.

        • My retirement plan will involve living somewhere reasonably central in a city where I can get around on public transport and won’t need to commute. For a couple of years I lived in downtown Ottawa and spent up to 3 hrs a day getting buses to work before I had a car. No fun when it is -30 either.

  22. Before we forget, tapping away on our plugged in or battery devices, originally this was a mainly music site. Are we all going to renege on recorded music and support only unamplified acoustic music. Or do we leave such to the next generation to realise?

  23. The problem is as individuals we are sometimes limited in what we can do. I live in an area where there is no mains gas. As a consequence I have no choice but to use Oil for heating.
    To use less oil I have invested in loft insulation, new double glazed hard wood window frames and a new more energy efficient boiler. Oil usage has reduced by in excess of 25 percent which is a small step.
    Aside from that as much recycling as possible, using hardly any plastics and reusing the ones we have to use.
    If everyone takes a small step we cn make a difference and in my industry now (freight forwarding) green credentials are becoming ever more prevalent from ultra low sulphur Ocean vessels to increased rail usage for freight. Not perfect yet but a massive change in last five years.

  25. Don’t drive, don’t fly, don’t smoke, stopped eating meat (apart from 4 or so visits a year to a house that host veritable feasts), always out early cleaning our village, don’t pollute the atmosphere with stuff from the dire 1980s.

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