Living a Low Carbon Footprint Life

Most people don’t understand the concept of a ‘carbon footprint.” But allow me to explain.

A ‘carbon footprint’ is how much indirect or direct greenhouse gas (ghg) is emitted from an individual, organization, event or product.

The debate regarding carbon footprints is “where do you stop the calculation?” How do you know what is a direct impact or a indirect impact? As I see it, we should talk about the starting cost of the carbon footprints and not the complete life cycle of the item/action. You have to end somewhere so that another can begin.

With that being said, by simply writing this blog leaves a certain amount of immeasurable ‘carbon footprint’ compared to writing it on paper and publishing it.

Let me see (without using exact numbers) how much greenhouse gases are emitted by writing this blog post.

Starting off by working from home and not working from home. I actually should be writing this at the office, but I think driving 10 miles to the office emits a good amount of ghg. Let’s say that’s 100 ghg (just as a reference point, not exact numbers.) If I decided to carpool into work instead of driving, then I could save 100 ghg for that day. So, zero. (Running total: 0 ghg)
I need light and my computer so that I can read up enough information about ‘carbon footprints’ and greenhouse gases. I figure it takes me 20 minutes to do research and using the car as my reference point, let’s say that is about 20 ghg. 1 ghg per minute I am researching this post. (Running total: 20 ghg)
I had to access 1) Wikipedia, 2)my server to host the blog, and 3)Google. So let’s be fair and say three more computers had to be on while I wrote this article. And using the computer before, 1 minute per ghg, that’s 20 ghg on wiki and Google (research) and 50 minutes using my server computer. (Running total: 110 ghg)
Actually writing this post on my computer took me 30 minutes. So I can edit (yes, I edit this and I still have grammatical errors, so leave me alone), find a picture and publish this post. That would be 30 ghg. (Running total: 140 ghg)

So, I had a total of 140 ghg used here. Now, you can get more detailed and calculate the weight of the extra person in the car, the material used like the computer monitor, the computer, keyboard, etc…but if you decided to purchase a car everyday and use a new computer everyday and do nothing else except to write one blog, you might have a point. But I am only calculating ’start up ghg’ and since you use these things everyday, the more you get out of the use of an item the less ghg it emits. Over time, the amount of ghg it emits become more beneficial so long as it isn’t being replaced.

If I wrote this blog on paper: (this should start out the same).

Starting off by working from the office. But I am carpooling, so, zero. (Running total: 0 ghg)
I need light and my computer so that I can read up enough information about ‘carbon footprints’ and greenhouse gases. 1 ghg per minute I am researching this post. (Running total: 20 ghg)
I had to access 1) Wikipedia, and 2)Google. That’s 20 ghg on wiki and Google (research); a total of 40 ghg (see above; 1 ghg per minute per computer). (Running total: 60 ghg)
Hand writing this post should take me longer to do. Let’s say 1 hour so that I can edit and look up dictionaries for spelling. But this emits almost no ghg because the resources I used are already spent. But I still have to publish this blog post somewhere. So let’s choose Popular Science. Popular Science prints about 1.3 million a year so if my article were to appear in a single month that would be 108,334 magazines printed of which lets say it takes 1 ghg per page. The printing of this article costs would be 108,334 ghg to make. (Running total: 108,354 ghg)

Before you get your panties in a bunch over my calculation, that’s the initial production cost to type or publish these post. There are a million other things that happen in the publishing that I cannot even fathom. Who is to say how many people actually read this post and turned on their computer adding to the ghg, or how many people read the magazine and pass it on to a friend reducing the ghg a fraction.

Now what can you do to leave less of a carbon footprint? Walk more? Read during the day instead of at night? Use reusable items like cloth bags rather than paper or plastic?

Okay, now that you’ve read this post, please turn off your computer. I don’t want to be responsible for the ghg emitted from your computer. (Even though you are offsetting the initial ghg cost when I wrote this article, you are also adding to it. Sigh, the debate will never end.)