By Daniel de la Calle
I confess I get irritated by the carbon footprint/credit scheme. Some months ago I did some research to try to understand just how carbon credits work, where you can buy them, how individual and national emissions are measured and I found the system to be complicated, bias, Kafkaesque. Here we are, under severe worldwide environmental problems deriving from our rampant consumerism and industrialized lives and someone has actually managed to create an industry out of “solving the problem” and juggling around the hot potato of CO2 emissions. It puts me in such a state of despair that I am going to stop writing about it now, but I did want to tell you that I recently did a carbon footprint test and thought it was useful and informative, it also gave me an idea of how I compare to other fellow human beings. There are several websites that offer online tests, the one I used is
http://myfootprint.org/
When you simply expect the worst it is amazing how little it takes to make you happy. I am so terrified of my wandering lifestyle of crisscrossing the world with airplanes that 2.89 Earths makes me feel quite good. I simply wonder what the number will be for those that do not only travel, but live in a harsh environment that demands lots of heating and cooling, that own several cars and buy more than I do. If you do the test, please share your results as a comment on the blog, I am very curious.
I think WWF was the organization that pioneered the “one planet” limit. Their latest report is on their website:
http://wwf.panda.org/about_our_earth/all_publications/living_planet_report/
If you would like to download the report as a pdf, you can find it here:
http://assets.panda.org/downloads/lpr2010.pdf
To wrap things up and follow this line of thought of use, misuse and abuse here is an article that talks about five kinds of fish you should eat more of
They are
SARDINES
WILD SALMON
DUNGENESS CRAB
FARMED MUSSELS
POLE-CAUGHT SKIPJACK TUNA
