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Chapter 1: How can we measure our carbon impact when making purchases?
So here's a question for you.
Do you consider the climate when you're booking a holiday, if you're buying a car or if you're renovating your home? Would you even know where to start to calculate the impact? Well, Saib O'Neill, climate and environmental researcher, has the answers for us now. Hello, Sive. Good morning, Clare. So explain to us what we are trying to figure out here.
Well, first of all, we have to think about what actually matters when we talk about climate impact. And what matters is the amount of emissions, which can come as continuous flow of emissions or as little pulses when we make a purchase. So anytime we are, you know, burning fossil fuels or We won't really get into the deforestation side of it today.
But when we're burning fossil fuels, we release gases.
Chapter 2: What factors contribute to our climate impact?
And carbon dioxide in particular is the main greenhouse gas. And it stays in the atmosphere more or less forever. So our impact is kind of permanent. And we kid ourselves that we can offset one bad thing with some little bit of good behaviour over here. But it doesn't really work like that in terms of the physics of climate change.
The impact is often permanent and it's really impossible to reverse it.
So should we be asking ourselves these questions with every purchase or how does it work?
Well, I think for every purchase, it would become very laborious and a bit draining and it would overburden the individual because a lot of the impacts are kind of systemic. They're to do with the infrastructure and the policies and the kind of economic system that we have. But there are some big decisions where our individual decisions at that moment in time
do make a difference and the first one and I might be a little bit late now in you know early June to be talking about holiday planning because many people you know would have planned their holidays earlier but when you are making a decision about where to go and how to get there that is the first area where you can you know make a difference in terms of the choices you make so obviously we're in Ireland you know it's we're far away from everywhere we tend to want to go
And so if we fly, there is going to be a climate impact and that's from the fuel that's combusted. But it's also an additional impact from what's known as the radiation forcing the impact of the aircraft in the atmosphere. So we have to account for both of that. So if you take a, you know, a flight, a one way flight, for example, from Australia.
London to Edinburgh would be similar enough, I'd say, from Dublin. That's about 110 kilograms. But when you add in that radiative forcing, it really doubles the impact. So by comparison, a rail journey is a minutiae comparison. Now, the practical option isn't always there. We can't always easily, you know, get from Ireland to the UK or mainland Europe by rail.
But if you combine it with ferries and if you're willing to make the effort to go slow travel, it is a very low climate impact. Now, there are some cons. I've done a lot of it. I've travelled all across Europe by train. You don't want to have small children in tow. It just doesn't work for them. You have a lot of connections to make. Booking the tickets is tricky. Running through train stations.
Yes, finding lifts. If you have a lot of luggage as well, I find that it's impractical because you, for example, you arrive in Euston Station in London, but you have to get to King's Cross to pick up the Eurostar. And that is impractical. very often because of the timetabling, you have very little time to do that and you wouldn't want to have lots of luggage.
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Chapter 3: How does flying affect our carbon footprint?
So not everything would be straightforwardly applicable to Ireland. We have different electricity, emissions, efficiency and things like that. But essentially, it goes through aspects of your lifestyle, how much meat you eat, how much food you eat out.
So in terms of your restaurants, takeaways, things like that, they all add up because food waste is another category where we release methane emissions. So avoiding food waste is one of the things you can do at a household level that does make an impact.
And then it asks about your purchase of appliances and tech like laptops and phones, things like that, and the size of your house and how it's heated. Now, I put in details for my very small terraced house, which is being renovated to a very high standard with all the insulation you could imagine. And it will have solar panels and electric heating.
And it still gave me a total carbon footprint of 9.6 tonnes, which is higher than the UK average. So and that's me being more or less completely vegetarian, though not vegan. And I put in one flight to London and one flight to mainland Europe.
Well, that's probably that's what probably what brought you up because you're using public transport all the time or cycling.
That's right.
So you've got to imagine that scales were tipped by the two flights, maybe.
I would have to go back and do it differently to see where the increase was. But that just shows you that even, you know, leading a fairly environmentally conscious life, my footprint is 9.6 tonnes per annum. And, you know, that shows that there's a lot that I need to do, you know, to bring that down.
So the slow travel, avoiding food waste, bringing my packed lunches and dropping dairy from my diet would bring me down to a vegan impact, which would be 0.5 to 0.7%. tons per annum in comparison to a full meat diet, which would give you something like about four times that.
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