i recently took a carbon footprint quiz to see how good [hopefully] or bad i was treating the planet based on my lifestyle. the last time i did one of these it was for a class in sustainable building and i needed 5.3 planets to sustain my way of life. yikes! well after a few changes i decided it was time to retake it. i scored 3.9 planets this time. not great, but a vast improvement over the last time. major changes to reduce my footprint? converted from an omnivore to an almost vegetarian, drastically reduced the number of miles i drive from over two hundred a week to right around 50 [i'll be taking the train to school this semester], and i took the snow tires off my car and am getting close to 40mpg. the quiz is rather general and doesn't account for a lot of things like how much you eat in a weekly basis, just that you eat; natural gas was the only option for home heating [i use oil and pellets] and it's calculated in dollars, not gallons or pounds; power consumption was also in dollars, not kWh; there is no place to input gallons of water, just that you use water; and no credits for using rainwater or for composting [the compost is potentially a big ticket item too considering how many tons of waste a family can stop from being trucked to a landfill]....i'm assuming that all of the answers are based on a national [or global] averge. it would be nice to have a more accurate way of caculating these values but it's still a great indicator and motivator. well, i have my work cut out for me - i'd like to drop my consumption even more and get below two planets by next year this time so wish me luck.
2 comments:
I'm at 5.2 It says i need 23 acres of land... I only owne 3.5, guess i need to buy some land :)
I use more then my share of electricity and use my car a lot, part of beign a computer consultant, but I could do better.
should get the dairy and eggs out of my diet, and get away from the processed / prepackaged / prepared foods.
On another note, since you sort of brought it up... I had to create a LEED calculator for one of my clients (Silpro Corp so they could provide numbers to the construction industry, and I found the standard to be a bit twisted. a raw material can travel almost 1000 miles to Mass, get used in a product that is then shipped back almost 500 miles, and qualify for LEED points as local.
although it occurs to me that another solution would be for me to go on a shooting spree and take out 5 or 6 people, then I'll have done my share.
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