My Carbon Footprint
A few years ago we realised that our household electricity bill was significantly above average. In fact it was way bigger than many of our friends in much larger houses. I was on a fairly cheap tarrif with Octopus Energy, but the average daily consumption of electricity was 38Kwh per day! The average for the UK is 10kwh.
Realising that the electricity bill was so large made us start to think about our own carbon footprint. Obviously the electricity usage was only one part of the total carbon footprint. We wanted to see what impact my lifestyle was having on the planet. We went online and found a number of cabon footprint calculators. Many of them were quite difficult to use and required an indepth knowledge of how our electricity company generated its power. One that we found quite simple to use was https://footprint.wwf.org.uk/#/
The results of the test were quite eye opening. See the image below. The CO2 footprint (22.5 tonnes per year) for each of us was more than double the UK average (10.5 tonnes per year), and the UK average is significantly above the world average (6.5 tonnes per year). If we were to offset the additional carbon usage each of us would have to pay around £848*per year.
(*I am going to write another blog post about how I came to this figure and why there is a significant problem with paying for Carbon Offsetting later)
We decided that we needed to do something. You can read about the first steps we took in a previous blog post here – https://margarets-blog.co.uk/saving-money-and-saving-the-planet-part-1/ . Having spent the last couple of years making some adjustments to the way we live our lives we can say that we have reduced our carbon footprint considerably, enjoyed researching and implimenting changes and saved a lot of money at the same time!
It must be noted that some of the things we have done have also cost a lot of money! But virtually everything we have done will pay us back in the short to medium term, and will provide a better return than ISA’s and savings accounts.
Before writing this post I went back to the same carbon footprint calculator to calculate the current carbon footprint and the results are shown below. The carbon footprint has reduced for each of us by around 64%, down to 8tonnes per year. We are now below UK average but have a long way to go to eliminate it altogether.
However!!!
There is a problem with calculating your personal carbon footprint. Doing so shifts the focus and resposibility for climate change onto individuals, and away from corporations and other things within the economy, such as oil companies, transport and farming. If every individual in the world reduced their carbon footprint down to zero it would not solve climate change. There is a good article on this subject here – https://ourworldindata.org/ghg-emissions-by-sector This shows that energy use within the home makes up only about 10% of all emissions.
Without industry and governments also taking action our personal actions will not be enough alone to get us out of this mess.
