How much focus do we each pay to our carbon footprint? I would say that I feel more of us are caring about this, and, since COP26 in Glasgow, paying specific attention to how many tonnes of CO2 we contribute each year.
in addition, friends know me to be relatively radical in living an “enough-ism” life, reducing car use (and yes, I’m an urban cyclist with my share of trauma and triggers from other drivers!). Am also a crowdfund level investor in Pawprint.eco and you can see my “Pawprint” above. In short, I care about this.
So, why am I guilty of Carbon Footprint hypocrisy?
Well, this weekend I’m going to leave home early Saturday to go stay overnight on Saturday with my best friend from University, getting home mid-evening on Sunday. It will be the first time I have visited in about two years and feels overdue. Oh, and I am flying there.
You see, I live South of London, near Gatwick airport, they live near Aberdeen airport. I can leave my house, walk to the train (am not driving to the airport, at least!) and be in his house within four hours by flying. If I were to take the train, the total time would be about 10 hours each way, so makes an overnight trip really not worthwhile.
According to the ICAO (so it is independent) calculator, my carbon footprint from this flight is 170kg, so represents about a 5% addition to my overall travel in my annual “pawprint”.
Now, according to the LNER calculator, the round trip carbon footprint, if I had travelled by train, would have been 57kg of CO2 round trip.
To be honest, I don’t feel that bad now, as the net difference of my impact from flying rather than taking the train was only 113kg of CO2. This actually feels like a reasonable choice given time savings. Oh, and due to the archaic rail fare system in the UK the cost of flying was well under half of the cost of railway tickets, so I gained (personally) economically too.
The point of this post? Simply to share my awareness around CO2 tonnes of personal “pawprint”, as well as to (I hope) encourage you to consider your own.
PS yesterday’s post: “Learning Balance” noted that in a peak year of business (and personal) travel for me, 2015, I flew 159k miles on 115 flights, making over 20 long haul flights. I shudder to think what THAT carbon footprint was, and also reflect on the calculator I used to aggregate all my flight records and that it made no mention at all in the collected summary of any carbon footprint! Hopefully times change and that becomes the primary focus, not working out quite how far one travels.