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The following article was published in our article directory on October 15, 2012.
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What is a Carbon Footprint?

Article Category: Home Management

Author Name: Clive Roux

A carbon footprint is the total of all GHG (Green House Gas) emissions caused by the actions of an individual, corporation or country. we only look at an individuals carbon footprint. Its important to understand your carbon footprint. Your carbon footprint, combined with those of all other humans now adds up to such a significant output of emissions that the earth is no longer able to absorb or process it. Our collective actions are now changing the composition of the atmosphere to such an extent that we are contributing to the heating up of the planet as the addition of carbon dioxide and methane, the so called greenhouse gasses and the main contributors to our carbon footprint prevent the heat of the sun from being able to escape.

What is the carbon footprint of the average American versus the rest of the world? On average the carbon footprint of an American is 50,000 pounds (25 tons) of CO2 (carbon dioxide) equivalent emissions. 50,000 pounds or 25 tons is a big number to get your mind around. If you tried to show how much space that takes up, it would cover 1 1/2 ice hockey rinks in a layer about 20 feet high. Other high income countries are putting out on average about 12.4 tons per capita. The world average is about 3.8 tons per capita. We've got work to do to get carbon fit and reduce the size of our carbon footprints America!

The problem is that as living standards rise around the world, as they should, the world average carbon footprint is rising as well and if all people lived at the same level as Americans, we would need the equivalent of about 4 planets to support that sized carbon footprint! That's a problem each one of us is contributing to and will have to resolve to reduce at some point. That is why we believe that the concept of living green means creating more happiness with less stuff. It is a new way of living. We will have to figure out how to measure affluence in terms of happiness rather than gaining or using more stuff and how to do more with a lot less while continuing to increase our happiness. The point here is that we need to start to think about how to use our growing affluence not so much as a means to gather more stuff around us that all uses resources but rather as a means to ask ourselves would this thing bring me more happiness. It is a subtle, but critical shift required in our thinking to ensure a sustainable future for all generations. Our greed now, could seriously hamper the planets ability to carry life. We have already reached that point!

The term CO2 equivalent refers to the way that carbon emissions have been standardized so that the emissions of other gasses, such as methane and other gasses are represented as the equivalent amount of CO2 that they would represent in order to make comparisons of different activities easier to understand using a single number.

To get a sense of the change that we have caused go back just 3 centuries and think about what life was like then. We walked, rode a horse and perhaps went in a carriage occasionally. We used wood burning stoves to cook, had no electrical appliances, gas burning devices or other products that used energy besides our lamps. Fire was the most energy we used in the production of goods. They were simpler times and the amount of emissions or our carbon footprint was tiny in comparison to the way we live today. The atmosphere could absorb the smaller amounts of pollutants we released from a much smaller population.

Today, our lifestyles are very energy dependent. We use energy for practically everything we do. Creating and using energy whether it is electricity or petroleum or natural gas, is the main contributor to CO2 emissions. We burn energy to move around . Our homes and buildings use 40% of all US energy and therefore create an enormous carbon footprint of their own. Producing the amount of food required to feed the world's population today requires huge amounts of energy as well. In a global economy all goods practically are shipped around the world, first as raw materials to the places where production is happening and then from the factories to the retailers and by car to our homes and finally by truck to a waste facility somewhere at the end of their life. It is an amazing system we have produced to bring things to people at prices that were unimaginable just a hundred years ago, but it has unintended consequences that we have been able to ignore until the last fifty years as we have started to study and developed an understanding of how the ecosystem of planet earth works and how our industrialization is interacting with it. We take it for granted that the earth is here and will be here for ever, regardless of what we do, but that is simply not true anymore and we can no longer ignore it.

What is a carbon footprint? Consider it as your canary in the coal mine, it is the indicator that represents the heartbeat of the planet and like a heartbeat, we need it to be pulsing along withing acceptable limits, not continuing to rise relentlessly as it is doing today.

Start by looking at your energy efficiency and work your way through a carbon diet to a road map of how you can continue to improve your carbon footprint going forward. We don't believe that reducing your carbon footprint means going backwards or doing without in the long term. We believe that reducing our carbon footprints is about using our incredible innovative capabilities to find new ways to do more with less and to continue to do that through observing how nature does uses natural organic compounds and low heat and pressure to grow materials and figuring out how to emulate that and replace our high carbon technical materials with more natural alternatives over time.

Reducing our carbon footprint is a journey that we need to accelerate. Each one of us can make a difference, not just in the amount you reduce your footprint, but also by the example you set and the influence you have on those around you. Every year, the Green Economy is growing!

Keywords: What is a carbon footprint, carbon footprint, live green

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