David Symons |
I’ve just come across a diagram in New Scientist that breaks the 11.1 average UK citizen annual co2 footprint down as follows:
Direct – Total 2.65 tonnes
1.03t car travel
0.36t flights
0.47t household electricity consumption
0.79t household gas consumption
Embedded – total 8.41
4.68t goods and services (clothing, waste disposal, street lighting, recycling)
3.25t food production and transport
0.48t household construction and maintenance
Is this correct in your experience? I’ve just had a wobble that if we’re all aiming for around 4 tonnes in our CRAGS that actually we’re all miles over the UK average.
All thoughts welcome. Cheers
David
You probably are over the average
Jamie
Hi David,
I would suggest that in all likelihood WSP employees are over the UK average by quite a way.
Generally middle class people (on the kinds of salaries at a leading consultancy) fly a lot more than poor people, and this makes a carbon footprint rocket as you know. When you consider that 50% of people in the UK are too poor to fly once a year (i.e. in an average year the poorest 50% of the population don’t fly at all) then it becomes clear why the average is pushed so high.
Also, it’s worth bearing in mind the different methodologies used to get to the ‘UK average’ figure. Calculators like Act on CO2 from DEFRA/DECC (which is powered by AMEE, who I work for) only assess the ‘direct’ emissions that individuals can control (i.e. domestic energy, personal transport and flights). The new Guardian calculator at http://www.guardian.co.uk/environment/interactive/2009/oct/20/guardian-q… uses a methodology that attempts to account for the embodied emissions of the type mentioned in the New Scientist.
In Act on CO2 the direct emissions are much higher on average than those in the New Scientist (4-5 tonnes I believe, but don’t quote me on that as I don’t have time to check right now) and it doesn’t attempt to account for the indirect/embodied ones.
What seems to be happening is that there is an emerging trend to include more embodied emissions (as in the New Scientist article and the Guardian calculator). As this happens, the indirect emissions are going up as we account for imports from China etc, but domestic emissions seem to somehow miraculously be going down so that overall there is only a slight increase in the overall footprint from the 10 tonnes that was often quoted a couple of years ago (the Guardian takes the UK average as 13 tonnes in total).
The main problem is that there is no canonical source for all of this so everyone is forced to try and wrestle the figures to the ground themselves, which is obviously nigh-on impossible. This is something we’re trying to solve here at AMEE by trying to make all of the methodologies available over web services, but it’s easier said than done. We’ll get there one day!
Jamie
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