Personal responsibility for carbon dioxide; the main conclusions

What this book is about.

Divide UK greenhouse gas emissions by the number of people in the country, and you get a figure of about 12.5 tonnes of carbon dioxide, or equivalent, per person. About half of this – approximately 6.0 tonnes – is directly created by the individual in running a house, a car and taking transport. he book shows how you can easily cut this number in half. The other half – about 6.5 tonnes – is generated by other activities, such as running offices, making fertilizer, smelting iron ore and transporting goods in lorries. The total figure of 12.5 tonnes, or equivalent, certainly needs to fall to 3 tonnes or less if we are to meet any of our long-term climate change ambitions.

So, the pessimist might say, the task is impossible. Even if a person has no directemissions from running home or car, he or she will still be responsible for the remaining 6.5 tonnes over which he has no control. This is not strictly true; for example, the food industry is a major polluter, and we can alter our buying habits to diminish indirect emissions. We can make a real dent in the indirect carbon dioxide we generate, and those emissions we genuinely cannot control, we can counterbalance by other measures. The final chapters of the book examine this point in detail. Individuals can reduce their responsibility for greenhouse gases in an infinite variety of ways. For simplicity, I have suggested that a reasonable target is to get one’s direct emissions down from 6 tonnes to 3 tonnes, and indirect responsibility down to a net figure of zero, making a total of 3 tonnes. Getting indirect greenhouse gases to zero means changing purchasing behaviour, particularly with regard to food, and, in addition, substantial cancelling-out or ‘offsetting’ of emissions in other ways. I have chosen to suggest, for example, that the purchasing of ‘green’ electricity could be thought of as a means of offsetting indirect greenhouse gases.

DIRECTLY PRODUCED EMISSIONS

The source of the 6 tonnes that we typically generate directly by our own actions is shown in the table below (more detail is contained in the Appendix to the book, page 293).

Table 5.1 of the book Direct greenhouse gas emissions of the typical UK individual

Tonnes

House:

Heating 1.2

Water heating 0.3

Cooking 0.1 (assumes that cooking is done by gas)

Lighting 0.1

Electric appliances 0.6

Total house 2.3

Car 1.2

Bus, rail 0.1

Air travel97 1.8