Jebus wrote: ↑Thu Nov 16, 2017 9:14 am
Jamie in Chile wrote: ↑Wed Nov 15, 2017 8:10 pmI just looked it up and I actually calculated my personal CO2e (not including my kids) for 2016 at 6 tonnes
Is there a calculator that considers what type of food you eat? The calculator I used gave me the following annual values:
House 1.99 metric tons of CO2e
Flights 1.74 metric tons of CO2e
Car 3.82 metric tons of CO2e
Secondary 5.54 metric tons of CO2e (3.22 of this is food and drink which I assume is lower since the calculator didn't ask what I eat)
I really feel awful after doing this. I drive a hybrid car which I only use for work, ride my bicycle whenever possible, eat a plant based diet, only drink local beer, travel once per year and still I get such a huge foot print.
I use http://www.carbonfootprint.com/calculator.aspx for household and transport, and I used the Guardian calculator for food and general consumption and my share of public/government services (military, hospital, schools, road construction etc), but all these are more of a rough estimate.
Your household number. I assume that is from heating, cooking and electricity. (Another factor to consider is the carbon used to build the house, this is NOT negligible.) Consider if you can tolerate a winter temperature of say 2C lower, wear more clothes, more insulation, take a shorter shower or coller temperatures. For your next house, consider that a smaller house impacts both on heating emissions and embedded carbon in construction. If you're really serious, there's always solar panels. However I suspect your household number is not where your greatest gains are to made, but I wouldn't neglect it either.
Flights - I've talked about this before. We all just need to fly less, cut it down to the essentials or fly less often but for longer. (I have not always practiced what I preached, however.) Does your estimate include a 2x factor for radiative forcing?
Cars - your number looks high but if you drive 45 minutes per day that is not a surprise. Just try and be creative and cut the total miles you drive per year somehow. If it's for work that can be tricky but the number looks too high to ignore.
Food - very strange that it didn't ask you questions about your diet. Margin for error is quite high for food since it depends whether and how you include forest destruction, secondary effects of land use etc. However 3 tonnes CO2e is probably about right for a meat eater, but by eliminating beef you can probably reduce it to closer to 2, if you are mostly vegan or vegan it is more likely about 1.5 and if you manage to throw away almost no food at all, and eat local food avoiding anything from outside your continent that might have been air freighted, buy foods with less packaging, and avoid bottled water almost completely, you could perhaps achieve 1.0. Less than that is going to be hard.
Read How Bad Are Bananas by Mike Berners Lee to learn more about these topics, including quantifying stuff, and it helps you figure out how to cut your emissions.
