My carbon footprint 2007

robinsmith3

website team CRAGger Islington Leeds Wokingham WSP

2007 was an important first years “experiment” for me to discover the outcomes of limiting my use of carbon. The easy way to account for this is through a personal carbon footprint. You can find the complete results here for. http://fon.gs/cf07

I’m not at all a green at heart, more a “post environmentalist”, so adapting to low carbon life or making sacrifices to lifestyle are not easy for me, because such changes will directly impact my social, status driven and political spheres of influence. Poor thing you say!

Prior to this experiment I took no notice at all of my energy use and carbon emissions and thus was by default a high emitter. My first discovery was that its a synch to make huge individual reductions overnight, but much harder next time around to make any more of an impact. So again every little does NOT count. The big stuff first is what matters and everyone can do it if they really want to. But we will need help from the system to go much further even in the short term.

So it is clear now that if the majority in society are not even willing to make the easy changes, there are still other factors far more important to them than the climate. I believe understanding this is fundamental to resolving the problem, far more so than fancy bolt on fiscal mechanisms. We need to fix the bugs in the system on a much broader scale. See the rest of my blog for my thought process on this. http://gco2e.blogspot.com

As the year rounded out it was clear that my immediate problems in energy terms were the following:

• I’m a single occupier household
• The house is too large for me
• I live outside a viable city transport system

• I do not share my car

Next year my goals are clearly in these areas if I chose to make further large reductions. I will need to make personal, social, environmental and lifestyle changes, that even to those who have already made the easy big reductions, would be personally and politically unacceptable.

Considering the consequences of these actions, will I be able to make a move to the next level or will I finally try to find a way out? 2008 will be telling.