Arising |
Hello,
A few sections to this message, but thought I may as well put it all in one place: – carbon footprint – ecological footprint – tools I plan to use for this year
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I have estimated my carbon footprint for the previous year – April ’07 to April ’08. I only did this roughly, as I do not have all the data from my old house. Using http://actonco2.direct.gov.uk (which is pretty, but not particularly functional) the result was: – CO2 from home heating 0.9 tonnes/year – CO2 emitted by appliances 0.93 tonnes/year – CO2 emitted by transport 1.94 tonnes/year
This totaled 3.77 tonnes for last year. The national average was said to be 4.48 tonnes/year. I believe this is an underestimation: resurgence calculator http://www.resurgence.org/carboncalculator/ estimated my emissions to be 23 tonnes for my flights alone last year?!
Having reviewed the calculators available on the CRAG site, and some of the others, my preference is for the Resurgence one, and will likely use that. Although, it makes completely different set of assumptions to the ActOnCO2 one – taking into account your share of industry, and estimating average carbon for UK pop’n at 10 tonnes!
Have others got preferences?
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I have also estimated my ecological footprint for last year, using the different calculators, but basically the same information. The results were:
Global Footprint: http://www.earthday.net/Footprint/ – 11 ha, 6.1 planets (if I round my flights last year up to 100 hours) 4 ha, 2.2 planets if I round my flights down to 25 hours)!
WWF http://footprint.wwf.org.uk/ 3.65 ha, 2.03 planets
If I went for an average, I would put it at: 7.5ha, 4,1 planets ; )
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For this year, I will be taking the gas and electricity readings in my current place directly, as my ‘landlord’ is on some payment scheme where he apparently doesn’t get the detailed bills.
I think I will be using this site to track carbon over time: http://www.carbondiet.org
Although it has limited functionality, “The site is only just starting out, and it’ll be growing rapidly and covering more and more emission sources as we go along.” I particularly like it because of the clean interface, visual display of your data etc. But, it just doesn’t have the detail that the Resurgence or other sites do…
It does, however, contain the equivalent detail to the calculation sheets available on the CRAG site…
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OK, that’s me for now, look forward to meeting on Thursday!
Andrew
My revised footprint
Arising
I have revised my footprint fro 2007-8 to be in line with the way everyone else is calculating it (using the CRAG conversion factors) and foodcarbon.co.uk.
The result this time is:
The flight calculations include the roughly £* multiplier because the CO2 is released at altitude etc. Strangely, using http://www.chooseclimate.org/ seemed to cut about 4 tonnes off my flight footprint versus CRAG, but they may have just been margins of errors in distances getting multiplied such that they become significant.
Either way it seems relatively clear where / how to reduce my emissions ; )
Convincing my landlord to change to green energy has been an unwelcome suggestion, but I think slight changes in behaviour e.g. people having showers instead of baths, cooking in microwave not oven etc. could offset the increase in cost…
Cheers
Andrew