Well calculating our CO2 Equivalent footprint turned out to be a little more difficult then I would have imagined!
My first thought was that I could simply find a carbon calculator that would do the hard work or me. That wasn’t to be the case. What follows are the carbon predictions that 4 calculators provided me with:
Google CO2 Calculator: 5.4 tonnes CO2e Carbon Footprints: 13.8 tonnes CO2e UK Government: 8.22 tonnes CO2e Earth Lab: 13.2 tonnes CO2e
In the end I took the easy way out and went for the highest figures that I had for each emissions type. So without further ado here it is:
Consumption Tonnes CO2e
House Elect 2.98
House Gas 0.048
Bus Travel 0.315
Train Travel 0.523
Subway Travel 0.03
6 round trips to Europe 2.232
2 Round Trips to Australia 7.612
Secondary Footprint 2.769
TOTAL = 16.509 Tonnes
That seams quite high considering we don’t generally drive and the UKs average is between 9 and 12 tonnes of CO2e per person. The reason for this is quite simple! We have at least 1 long distance return flight per year (each). Flying adds about 9.8 Tonnes of CO2e to our footprint!
If you ignore flight and our secondary footprint (which calculators ignore) we account for less then 4 Tonnes of CO2 per year (for both of us).
A few months ago we decided to start ordering our fruit and veg from a company called Able-Cole. These folk have a neat business delivering local produce from the local farmer to the consumer. Additionally they source fair trade products from other countries when the local industry can’t/doesn’t produce them (ex: coffee).
Additionally we have started to buy only free range and organic products from the super market. I think is even more important in a country like the uk where so much of the meat is from high intensity farming (feed lots etc).
Maybe we should even start growing our own….. Now that’s food for thought.
Well I did make it one of my new years resolutions to get this whole blogging thing going again.
As a result I have updated this site quite a bit. Hopefully the design is a little cleaner. I am slowly customising the theme from nitrogendesigns.com and gotchance.com, these guys have done an excellent job with the theme…. which is making my job even easier!
The following footage was taken from Lollapalooza 2007. The footage shows the censoring of anti George Bush commentary during the end of the pearl jam song Daughter. This footage first shows the censored footage and then the real footage.
The followling links provide additional information:
I have added a number of new photographs to our flickr site. These include photographs from this weekends U2 concert as well as from the G20 anti globalisation protests that were recently held in Melbourne.