To deal with climate change, many of us need to reduce our carbon footprint. But what does a truly low-carbon lifestyle look like \u2013 and can it really be achieved through personal choice alone?<\/p>\n
As 2020 drew to a close, Carys Mainprize set herself a challenge for the year ahead: spend the next 12 months living off two tons of carbon, an amount equivalent to about half the annual emissions of an average US gasoline car.<\/span>\u00a0<\/span>It was not an easy challenge. Mainprize lives in the UK, where average annual consumption per person exceeds four times its target: 8.5 tonnes of carbon dioxide equivalent <\/span> (CO2e), which is a measure that includes CO2, methane and other greenhouse gases.\u00a0<\/span>Mainprize, a communications officer at a climate non-profit, began researching the carbon footprint of everything she could. She wanted to see what it would take \u2013 and whether it would even be possible \u2013 to live in the UK with a personal carbon contribution roughly similar to what we will all have to achieve in the next decade,<\/span> to avoid the worst effects of climate change. Surveys show that many people want to get involved in climate action,<\/span>\u00a0but putting very low-carbon living into practice can be tricky: it can mean changing several aspects of everyday life, especially for the wealthier parts of society.\u00a0But experiments like Mainprize could help show the rest of us the way forward, what a sustainable society might really look like \u2013 and the wider changes we need to get there.\u00a0<\/span>So what would the world look like if those of us who currently emit far more could manage to reduce our emissions to safer levels?\u00a0<\/span>Challenging climate:\u00a0In some ways, two tons is an arbitrary number. After some research, Mainprize decided that this would be a decently ambitious goal. In his carbon footprint book How Bad Are Bananas, researcher Mike Berners-Lee suggests readers could now aim for a five-tonne lifestyle, which he says would already be "a big step" for most in the UK forward\u201d. (Jocelyn Timperley, BBC)<\/em><\/span><\/p>","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" To tackle climate change, many of us need to reduce our carbon footprint. But what does a truly low-carbon lifestyle look like \u2013 and can it really be achieved through personal choice alone? As 2020 drew to a close, Carys Mainprize set herself a challenge for the coming year: to spend the next 12 months living off two tonnes of carbon, [\u2026]<\/p>","protected":false},"author":9,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_acf_changed":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[4,1],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-2776","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-klimaticka-zmena","category-znizovanie_co2_cdr_ccs_ccu_dac"],"acf":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.co2news.sk\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2776","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.co2news.sk\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.co2news.sk\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.co2news.sk\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/9"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.co2news.sk\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=2776"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.co2news.sk\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2776\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.co2news.sk\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=2776"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.co2news.sk\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=2776"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.co2news.sk\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=2776"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}