A rather interesting article recently featured in New Scientist, which someone on the internet kindly made public (one needs to subscribe before one can read anything on New Scientist, isn’t the internet a friendly place?), that really gets to grip with whether or not the constant barrage of what to do to cut your individual carbon footprint is worth the hype.

It’s a fair question to ask - whether or not my switching off the lights whenever I leave a room can possibly affect the harm done by a billion Chinese who are busy jacking up their emissions as if there’s no tomorrow. Would the planet even notice if we just stopped trying?

This article suggests an unequivocal ‘YES’

“Emissions reductions are a bit like taxes: you may not like them, and your individual contribution may seem too measly to matter, but multiply that by several million and you can start to move mountains.”

Which is really heart warming, considering the amount of energy we’ve already expended in sharing with urban sprout readers why they should consider being more green! There are a couple of really interesting snippets (it’s a long article, but worth the read):

“In general, just under half of the emissions for which each of us is responsible come from things over which we have personal control, such as how much we drive and fly and how we heat and power our homes. Of the rest, about 25 per cent of the total arises indirectly through powering our workplaces, about 10 per cent comes from maintaining public infrastructure and government, and about 20 per cent is emitted during the production of the things we buy, including food.”

“…it is possible to cut individual emissions by around 75 per cent without seriously altering our lifestyles. For a western European, that means slashing personal emissions from about 12 tonnes of CO2 to just 3 tonnes.”

Here are some things I didn’t know:

On cars: “…delay buying a new car. A typical car takes between 3 and 5 tonnes of CO2 to manufacture. That is twice what it typically emits in a year. So even if the new model would be more fuel-efficient, it is probably better to put off buying it.”

On food: “Yet many of the biggest energy inputs (and hence carbon outputs) of our food come from growing and processing food, rather than transporting it. Manufacturing fertiliser, heating greenhouses and food processing are major energy guzzlers, so buying locally is by no means automatically the greenest option. Trucking in tomatoes from sunny Spain often uses less energy than heating a greenhouse in the UK, for instance.” (Wish the UK would take a leaf out of this article and quit discriminating against African farmers because they have to transport their organic produce by air into the UK [urban sprout] )

And finally: “Ultimately, we will need to bring global emissions down low enough to match nature's ability to absorb them, which may be as low as 10 to 20 % of today's global emissions. But if a significant number of people change their ways and demand greener products, that will send a big signal to the market, encouraging the supply of green energy, low-carbon products, organic food and so on.”

Read the full article here.