Note: The following is a report I did for a class I'm currently enrolled in titled Ecological Anthropology in which we were assigned to use an online calculator to find our carbon footprint and analyze our score.
At
a time where the impact of human activity on the environment is increasingly finding
its way into public awareness, it’s natural to reflect on our own lifestyles to
see how much each of us is contributing to the problem. An easy way to quantify our personal impacts
is to estimate our carbon footprint, the amount of greenhouse gasses one is
responsible for releasing. With the
number one environmental challenge of the day being the changing of our climate
due to human release of greenhouse gasses, this can easily be seen as a general
reflection of our personal impacts. There
are many readily available online calculators that can be used to conduct this
assessment. In an effort to review my
own environmental impacts, I tried one of these calculators out.
The
calculator I used was the The Nature Conservancy’s Free Carbon Footprint
Calculator.[1] I was asked to answer a variety of questions
about my lifestyle among four categories: Home Energy, Driving and Flying, Food
and Diet, and Recycling and Waste. The
system meanwhile calculated an estimate of the amount of greenhouse gasses I’m
responsible for emitting per year in units of tons of CO2
equivalent. My result? Fourteen metric tons per year.
Of
course, a particular value given for carbon footprint doesn’t mean a whole lot
by itself, so I looked into some average carbon footprints for people of
different parts of the world to see how I compare. The good news is I seem to be responsible for
less emissions than the average American who releases 19.86 metric tons of CO2
equivalent (tCO2e) per year, and far less than people in very rich
countries who whose economies are based largely on fossil fuel production such
as Kuwait (62.30 tCO2e).[2] However, my footprint is significantly higher
than the vast majority of people’s in the world. The world average is about 5 tCO2e.[3] Some poor, less
industrialized countries have almost negligible values, such as Burundi (0.30
tCO2e). But even in China, a
very highly industrialized county, people are responsible for significantly less
emissions (8.13 tCO2e), due to distribution over their population
size.
My
high carbon footprint is certainly due to the fact that the US is more
industrialized than most countries.
Additionally, I’m a product of a culture that is based on the use of
huge amounts of energy, from powering our homes and electronics to fueling our
transportation. These are things that
are hard for an individual like myself to get away from. However, the fact that my footprint came in
smaller than the average American suggests that I’m doing some things
right. The calculator lowered my total
for several answers I gave, including being a vegetarian and regular
recycling. So it’s bothering to see that
I’m still responsible for more emissions than much of the world’s
population.
There
are no doubt steps I could take to reduce my footprint further, however what my
results illustrate is there is still a limit for how little impact I can have
based on the society I live in. For this
reason, I’m less concerned with my own personal impact than the underlying systems
that cause a society like the US to do so much harm to the environment. Perhaps a better personal indicator could be
how much each of us as individuals are doing to challenge these systems.
[1] The calculator I used was recently replaced by an updated system,
and can no longer be found. The new one
only measures carbon footprint for an entire household, not for
individuals.
[2] All individual country data is 2012 values from the World
Resource Institute’s CAIT Data Explorer.
[3] The Nature Conservancy Free Carbon Footprint Calculator.
Image source: https://r3continuum.com/2015/12/08/small-carbon-footprints/
Image source: https://r3continuum.com/2015/12/08/small-carbon-footprints/