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Carbon confusion: What’s the best way to help the environment?
photo by eisenbahner (source: Flickr Creative Commons)
A recent piece in the London Times entitled ‘After lunch we’ll save the planet’ documents a project that set out to calculate the carbon footprints of four families living in the U.K. It came up with some interesting results. The families consider themselves to be living generally Green lifestyles and are conspicuously upper middle class. How they go about being ‘eco-friendly’ differs, but the overall picture is a curious mix of luxury, admirable effort, frustration and sacrifice. They really want to be Green and exemplary, but they also have a lot of money and like the rest of us, are not in control of all the details in their lives that contribute to their CO2 footprints. And even if you’re involved in Green industry or environmental projects on a bigger scale, being wealthy and having a small carbon footprint typically do not go hand in hand. There also seems to be a lack of understanding or acceptance about what really contributes to that footprint.
‘Millest has bought books about being green, and unlike some people he says he never switches off when the subject comes up in conversation. But he’s still baffled.’
–London Times
The times article puts air travel way at the top of the list for individual and family carbon footprints, something that the members of the U.K.’s middle class – Green or otherwise – apparently have a hard time accepting. As far as personal lifestyle goes, flying causes the most direct and measurable emissions. Period. Or?
According to this January 2008 opinion piece for BBC News by Green Futures magazine editor Martin Wright, deforestation is the real culprit.
‘It is already the largest single source of carbon emissions after energy, contributing up to 10 times as much as aviation,’ argues Wright. He explains that on an individual level the effects of deforestation seem much harder to calculate and also harder to stop. Anyone can quit flying anytime if they really want to, but how many people can halt rainforest destruction? Even entire governments can’t. But in Martin Wright’s eyes, the bigger picture tells a far different story:
‘This is bitterly ironic, because politically and economically it would be much easier to make massive reductions in deforestation than to achieve similar cuts in air travel. And in terms of curbing climate change, that would be massively more effective, too.’
–Martin Wright (source: BBC News)
Forest preservation in Puerto Rico, photo by Oquendo (source: Flickr Creative Commons)
Preserved forests also continue to do good for the environment and its inhabitants – as carbon sinks or ‘lungs’ of the planet, as well as sources of food and medicine. And there are small ways we can preserve them – by donating to organizations like Cool Earth, who pay and local aid tribes to protect areas of forest. They are, after all, the ones who live there. So don’t book your flight to Brazil just yet. There’s no need to go flying off to the Amazon to stop deforestation in person – thereby contributing to a bunch of greenhouse gasses – just pay some locals to do it for you and avoid that whole ‘hornet’s nest’.
Seriously though, clearly the Times article is focusing more on personal lifestyle while Wright’s is more concerned with political will. But it may also be that those two things aren’t disparate as we sometimes think. There are as many ways to cut back or prevent further damage to environment as there are ways to harm it. We, as concerned average citizens, just need more and better information about what those ways are. Reducing how much we fly is one big important step for some and protecting the rainforests is another (huge) one – for everyone.
Read the Times article here and the BBC piece here.
By Graham Land
Additional resources:
Cool Earth
Tags: BBC, carbon, carbon footprint, environment, flying, Green, Martin Wright, rainforest
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