Carbon neutral

Really?

I am noticing that this concept of carbon neutral companies and even countries (the Vatican state) is gaining some ground in the media.

The naive impression that I get whenever I hear this is that these guys are way out there ahead of me in changing their ways, and a shining beacon of environmental responsibility that we should all follow. Hooray we are saved... But hang on

How can I achieve carbon neutrality anyway? I breathe and I fart, and I drive a car, and I eat food that has been bought at a supermarket and transported (sometimes some ridiculous distance) and occasionally I cook it too?

So how can a company, none the less a country, even little Vatican state really claim to be carbon neutral? Surly the Cardinals and the Pope himself are not living a life so frugal and modest to emit no carbon!

A mental image of a monk in the dark ages,
in a cold, dank cell wearing a hessian sack,
who has not bathed in months,
praying by candlelight springs to mind!
But hang on, what about the candle?
Is it not emitting CO2?

I guess carbon neutrality is a theoretical term.
If I create CO2, then I need to do something that will take that carbon out of the atmosphere and lock it away somewhere to be able to claim to be 'carbon neutral'.

I dug around abit online to learn more about this, and found that planting trees, or entire forests is an easy way to offset my carbon habits. In fact it is the main way to do it today. There are some other things such as giving money to China so that it will use cleaner technology when building its next coal fired power station (of which they are building more than 1 a day!).
But this I find is more or less only on the fringes. This article on the subject summed it up well in my eyes.

This is starting to sound like an alcoholic
who donates money to AA,
and then claims to be doing something
about his drinking problem!

Far from independent and certainly not lacking in self interest, these sites are a reasonable place to start to calculate what your real CO2 footprint is:

BP's carbon footprint calculator - I tried it but the computer I am on right now does not have flash installed (it is not my computer so I do not want to install anything new on it). I tried the non flash version but this resulted in an error after I had submitted all my data. Nice try BP.

CO2 balance is a site devoted to this subject, but seems to be very quick to give you a way to offset your CO2 with a financial contribution. It is hard to gauge easily what happens to your money though. In general, I think it is focusing on offsetting rather than mitigating.

Carbonfootprint.com also offers a footprint calculator and links it to some offsetting payment scheme. Again hard to gauge its actual effectiveness.

The UK government has setup a flashy graphical calculator that seems to be far more in depth in its analysis of lifestyle in its calculation of carbon emission. It also outputs your performance in relation to the UK average and also supplies a recommendations report on how you can reduce your carbon footprint further. Nice work. Pity it is very UK centric to the point that it requires you input a UK postcode in the first page and will not continue unless on is given.

I think that there are plenty more of these things online. After trying out the ones above, I found that my families footprint varied greatly. Results were between 3 tonnes to 18 tonnes per year! I can understand the difference after doing the tests since there must be so many assumptions made in the calculation, but if there was anywhere a need for independent standardisations, it is here.

Just before I published this entry I came across this long but very interesting story. I have not finished reading it yet, but what I have read, is very interesting if this subject interests you at all.

First post

Hi there.

This subject of global warming has me all confused!
It has become such a complicated issue and I am finding it hard to connect it all to my life and the impact that I am making?
Another way to put it is that, I want to worry about this but I do not exactly know how to?

For example: I have decided to keep my holiday more local, but is it better to fly to my holiday destination, or do I drive my family there? which option will emit less CO2 in the end?
or
Should I still take my family on holidays to the far off destination by plane, because if the tourist industry in this location collapses then the people there will revert to some activities that are far more polluting and the net result will be bad? And then if I want to budget into my holiday an investment to offset the CO2 that my holiday produced, how much money and where do I put it? locally to me or my holiday destination? Where do I find out how to do this?.....?...? and the list of questions goes on and on

With all the information that is being thrown at us on this subject, it is becoming harder and harder to be responsible and easier and easier to turn your head and live with the guilt of each little thing we do basically as before.

As the introductory entry to this blog, what I would like to do is to shine a light from the grass roots level, from the average consumers point of view on this subject.

I am just like you!
but I am going to try to make my little difference and share what I learn with you.
Hence the name of this blog: 1 tonne - the goal is to have all the members of my family personally emit 1 tonne of CO2 per year. Don't know if I can do it, but I think it is worth trying.

Wish me luck.