by Environment Team member, Rena Levin, AWC Oslo
2018 may be remembered as the year planet Earth cried for help loud enough for humans to begin to hear. Devastating forest fires in California, a deadly heatwave in Japan, drought in central and northern Europe, severe flooding in Kerala, India - environmental disasters were often on the news. Though no single extreme weather event can be attributed to climate change, the increasing number and severity of them point to the reality of what scientists have been trying to tell us for years. We must reduce greenhouse gas emissions drastically and quickly.
Though climate change is getting harder to ignore, understanding how you can make a difference can be challenging. Would that greenhouse gas emissions were tangible, that reducing them would be as easy to see as plastic collected at a beach clean-up or trash and recycling bins filling up more slowly than they used to.
Carbon footprint
Everyone has a carbon footprint. Your footprint size is measured in tons of CO2 emitted to fuel things you do over the course of a year. In order to shrink your footprint, you first have to know how big it is. Thankfully, carbon footprint calculators are easy to find on line. The specific questions vary a bit, but all of them focus on household energy consumption (size of residence, power source, insulation etc.), transportation (local and long-distance), and lifestyle (consumer habits, diet etc.). To get a sense of your footprint try:
- UN carbon footprint calculator, and/or
- myclimate.
The results you will get are estimates based on your best guess of what you do. They may vary a bit and they will be imperfect. That’s ok. Don’t get hung up on particulars, distracted by small discrepancies in results, or immobilized by thoughts of how these calculators may not be fully accurate. Indeed, if anything the main problem with footprint calculators is their tendency to lowball estimated emissions. So don’t let the perfect be the enemy of the good! The most important thing to do is to act.
Once you have a sense of how big your footprint is and what contributes most to its size, you can figure out how best to shrink it. My husband and I live in a modest two-bedroom apartment that runs on 100% renewable electricity. We don’t have a car, are not big shoppers and I am vegetarian. Nonetheless, when I calculate my emissions on the Global Footprint site the result comes back that if everyone lived like me, we would need two planet Earths. Yikes!
My results on other calculators are similar and the culprit is not surprising. In a normal year, about half 
of my annual emissions are the result of flying. For those of us who are financially comfortable and living abroad, flying is not unusual. But from a climate change perspective, it is one of the worst things individuals do. A single roundtrip transatlantic flight from London Heathrow to New York JFK in economy class (the most fuel efficient class) emits 2.1 tons of CO2 per person. That is the same total CO2 emission as one would get driving a compact gasoline car for 9,000km - roughly the distance from Anchorage, Alaska to Guatemala City. Flying may be convenient and sometimes necessary, but it is a major climate sinkhole with emissions that are hard to fathom given how quick and easy it is.
Sometimes necessary...?
Note the phrase “sometimes necessary,” as it is an acknowledgement of life’s realities. I am cutting back on flying, but have made a few transatlantic trips this year to help my mom move into a senior community. It was a big and necessary step that she could not have managed on her own. But it has environmental consequences. This is where climate offsets come in. Reducing the size of your footprint as much as possible is top priority. Next best and very important is to compensate for unavoidable emissions by purchasing carbon offsets. Offsets fund charitable projects that reduce, avoid, or remove greenhouse gas emissions. Examples include building solar power plants in the Caribbean, supporting reforestation in Nicaragua, making affordable efficient cook stoves available in Kenya, and building wind power plants in India.
Offsets are an imperfect science and should not be used as a free pass for high emission lifestyle choices, but they do help. In addition, they make more visible the hidden costs to the planet of CO2 emissions. Myclimate.org and the UN Climate Offset Platform are two places where you can purchase offsets. The Myclimate site is doubly useful. In addition to being able to buy offsets for unavoidable emissions, its carbon calculator can be used to make adjustments that reduce unavoidable emissions at the outset. For example, the calculator shows me that I can spare half a ton of CO2 by flying to DC from Oslo via Reykjavik vs. making the same trip via Frankfurt.
Let’s get to work!
The budding environmental movement of the 1970s brought us the familiar “reduce, reuse, recycle” logo. Air pollution, poor water quality, and waste management problems were key concerns and that easy to remember guidance has had a positive effect. Four decades later the overarching environmental issue is climate change. And with it comes a new imperative concerning C02, “Measure, reduce, offset.” Let’s get to work.
PS - For an easy guide to readers who may not take the time to calculate their footprints, there are numerous articles we can link to. Rena's a fan of this one.
