The Five Worst Things for Your Carbon Footprint
If you are, like me, a human living on planet earth in 2022, your carbon footprint is probably pretty massive. Everything we do from mineral extraction to manufacturing and even agriculture has a net positive impact on total atmospheric carbon. The world’s forests can offset some of this, but with a growing population of ultra-rich consumers, we cannot sustain the current rate at which we produce carbon. With about 30% of the world covered in forests and 8 billion people, we would each have a “budget” of something like 1.5 tons of carbon each that could be used without increasing total greenhouse gasses. But very few of us actually meet this standard…
Here 5 activities you might partake in that contribute to a higher carbon footprint, how to reduce these activities, and even reverse the effects of climate change:
5. Living in a Town or City
Living in a town or city means that you probably have heat or a/c, you use lights and cellphone chargers, you might drive a car, and you probably spend some money on fun activities and luxury items. All of these activities produce greenhouse gasses in one way or another.
If you were a vegan monk living in a moderate climate where you don’t need heating and you can harvest most of your food from the forest, you would have a very low carbon footprint. If we all lived like this we would certainly reverse some of the effects of climate change, but it isn’t realistic to have 8 billion monks and 0 consumers on Earth. To offset our carbon emissions in our current age we need a way to invest in carbon sinks.
4. Eating Anything From a Grocery Store
The supply chain that brings food from the farm to the grocery store produces a ton of carbon.
Large-scale monocultures are not efficient at reducing carbon. You need more land per kilogram of food and the food needs to distributed to the stores. Plus, most of the food there has to be processed and packaged so the farms that supply the grocery stores are not reducing your carbon footprint.
The more food you can produce yourself, the less you will have to drive to the grocery store and buy produce covered in plastic that was shipped from Mexico. A diverse food forest full of fruits, nuts, herbs, beans, greens, grains, and root vegetables is ideal for your health and for producing the most amount of calories per square inch. If you grow your own food, you will greatly reduce your carbon footprint. Even a pot of herbs on your windowsill can help, but even the best agricultural practices produce some carbon emissions…
3. Eating Beef and Lamb
Cows and sheep produce lots of methane which is 28 times more powerful as a greenhouse gas than carbon dioxide. This means that if you eat beef or lamb 5 days a week and another source of protein the other 2, you will still be using more than your yearly budget of on feeding alone. By eating more fruits and vegetables and less beef and lamb, we can save a lot on carbon production and actually have room in our budget leftover for something other than food.
2. Flying
A lot of that oil is used for transportation and ends up in our atmosphere after being burned in our cars and planes. A single domestic flight produces about 300kg of atmospheric carbon per passenger while an intercontinental flight can produce more than 4 metric tons! That means that if you are flying from Toronto to Manila once a year you would be more than two times over your yearly budget of carbon for the year in a single trip. If you fly on a private jet, the greenhouse gas effect is at least 10 times as high in a single flight with some estimates as high as 100 times.
1. Land Development
People love to purchase and develop land. Whether for business or pleasure, this means destroying someone else’s home and possibly putting local species at risk of extinction.
Deforestation is arguably the worst thing on this list. We are literally cutting down (or in some cases burning!) the very beings that turn our garbage air into fresh air.
We replace the carbon absorbing, life supporting forests with airports, factories, oil rigs, and cottages, which produce even more carbon.
But there is a way to reverse the effects of climate change.
Sequestering Carbon to Offset Your Carbon Footprint
If becoming a monk doesn’t sound cool to you, carbon storage through reforestation might be a more practical way to offset your lifestyle. There are machines in development that can store carbon by filtering it directly out of the air. However, it costs about $600 to store only one ton of carbon using these machines.
Luckily, there are already more efficient carbon sinks on Earth. A single oak tree can absorb several tons of carbon over its lifetime and only costs a few dollars to plant. Natural systems for storing carbon like forests and grasslands can be studied and replicated to artificially build habitats which will provide resources for endangered animals and actively store carbon long-term in the soil.
Reforestation is one of the only human activities which can actually store carbon effectively. The great part about reforestation is that it can be scaled exponentially with more capital. Reducing consumption can only go so far but we can actually make our net carbon emissions negative by increasing reforestation. The only way for this to happen is for people who care about the environment to invest in land that will be used for building forests.
If you have access to land that could be used as a carbon sink but don’t know where to start, we can design a beautiful, low-maintenance, carbon sequestering garden full of native plants that will feed your family, feed the wildlife, and reduce your carbon footprint. To get an estimate on garden design, please contact me using my email address below.
Thanks for reading!
Scott Carroll
Carroll Property Services
scott@carrollpropertyservices.ca
