AIBU to think I should know my carbon footprint

[Southern]

Does anyone know their footprint and offset it? Am I a very bad person for not doing this? I looked at just offsetting my not very fancy car this week and it's quite expensive but is it something I should do and how is it different to just giving to a charity? Does anyone know? Sorry if I am coming across as completely uneducated on this

I don't have a clue what ours is.

It’s practically impossible to know your carbon footprint due to the massive number of variables that exist within even the simplest calculations.

I work in sustainability and IMO the best thing for individuals is to understand what alternatives are available, whether it’s food, cars, heating, travel, and the impact these choices can have on your carbon footprint, rather than knowing the ‘exact’ number. Paying to offset is not as good a strategy as trying to reduce your footprint in the first place - you don’t need to know the exact number to be able to do this.

There was a BBC programme called Feast to Save the Planet about the carbon footprint of food which was really interesting. It’s always a balance though, with food it’s a compromise between availability, cost, carbon footprint, welfare etc. It’s really hard but it’s great that you’re looking at it.

It depends on how you calculate it and what you include. I knew what it was by one calculation a few years ago, but now things such as your food consumption and where that comes from are considered. So my not eating certain fruit in winter and/or buying from the local market may be reducing it.

Do you really need your car? Could you manage with home delivery for larger food items, and the odd taxi or minicab for journeys that cannot be made by public transport.

It's not unreasonable to not know something that's pretty much impossible to know. Does anyone know this?

The best thing , I think, to do is not to think about offsetting but about trying to reduce your personal footprint

Reduce miles driven, reduce meat consumption that kind of thing. Tackle the big things

There are tools that estimate your carbon footprint but as everyone has said, it can only be an approximation

I suppose you would have to work it out on a retrospective basis. Last month, or last year or whatever.

The easiest thing to do is is you drive everywhere, try and walk or cycle short journeys.

I suppose things like living in an older house and driving a significantly older car would offset it. As they would have both been built, or built from, materials harvested long ago and had many years of use out of them, even when compared to a newer more efficient house or car.

Thank you, really useful comments. Especially keen to know what you think of carbon offset schemes which you pay for, I assumed (I think wrongly) that they would be planting trees but they seem to fund projects like making other people more sustainable, does anyone know how that's different to just giving to a charity? @Letsnotargue really keen to know from your industry point of view

@Southern
Carbon reduction is still pretty new in mainstream business and lots of people have recently been told that their company will be carbon neutral by XX date and they have no idea how they are going to get there. The first step is to try to identify your current carbon footprint, and then try to work out how to reduce it. For businesses to say they are carbon neutral (and mean it) they will have to quantify their carbon emissions, but it is still based on assumptions and models and is a step too far for individuals IMO.

Businesses look at carbon emissions under 3 scopes. Scope 1 is the emissions directly caused by you - generally the fuel you burn on your premises and other things you do that release carbon. Some industrial processes like cement manufacture release carbon dioxide from their raw materials so this is counted here.

Scope 2 is the carbon emissions from someone else providing you with energy, so electricity, steam generation etc.

Scope 3 is basically everything else that you are not directly in control of. As a business this would be your suppliers emissions in manufacturing whatever it is, packaging, transport to get it to you. Plus everything downstream - how you get your goods to your customer, what they do with it, and any emissions related to scrapping it, waste produced etc.

Just collecting and analysing this data will likely take years. A lot of businesses will only be able to become carbon neutral if they rely on technology that hasn't even been invented yet, but the common 2050 deadline allows for things like this to happen. Offsetting is considered to be a last resort when all other options have been exhausted. The global solution is going to be reducing carbon emissions at source, not by having huge sponges (plants, sequestration etc) to soak up ever increasing emissions.

As an individual these scopes don't translate directly, but in general your footprint will be a lot higher from goods and services that you use than they will be from the fuels that you use in your home. You can't directly control scope 3 emissions, but you can make choices that minimise the amount of emissions that are down to you (if that makes sense).

There is a huge amount of information out there, but a lot of it is interdependent and you can't take any of it in isolation. For instance, the BBC show considered the carbon emissions of a steak. From a locally grown and slaughtered cow they are quite large, but when you look at steaks imported from Brazil you have to look at not only the transport, but also the fact that they have chopped down rainforests to grow food crops for the cattle. Obviously this impact is really difficult to quantify for one steak, but it's something to bear in mind. You can then stray into social considerations where local people may or may not be employed in conditions that we would expect in the UK, but is the right answer to stop giving them business completely? Then what do they do?

Without rambling any further, it is a huge topic and there's loads of reading you can do online but there is no easy answer. My advice would be to think of things in lifecycle terms. A new car might be more efficient, but consider the impact of building a whole new car - that's a false economy in carbon emission terms alone. Buying something that is built to last rather than a cheaper item that may need replacing far sooner (I know that's not always the case). Making do and mending is going to be the way to go - living more like our grandparents used to in some ways rather than consuming and replacing things on a whim. I could go on for hours, but I hope this is useful (and hasn't sent you to sleep!)

The book How Bad Are Bananas is a really good intro on this topic and gets you thinking about places to make cuts or 'sustainable' practices that are anything but.

@letsnotargue thank you for that, it's a really useful summary and great way of thinking about it

Pukkatea, I was just about to recommend that book!
If I remember right, he says that we should all develop a feel for the carbon cost of an item or service just like we have a vague idea of the relative costs of things.

So we know for example that it's usually cheaper to buy stuff in bulk, that hand made is usually more expensive, and if we spend all our money on one thing we can't spend it on another.
In the same way we need to develop our sense of the carbon cost of things - how was this thing made? where was it made? how did it get here? As PPs have said, buying a shiny new thing that purports to be low carbon may be worse than continuing to use the older thing, even if it is less efficient/made of plastic.
Turns our bananas aren't so bad after all, because they come here on boats.