Calculating my carbon footprint

I wanted to work out my baseline carbon footprint (tonnes of CO2 produced from the burning of hydrocarbons in my everyday life) , so I can see the impact of making changes. There are loads of carbon calculators out there, the ones which were most UK-centric and that I found useful were:

• an article by a home eco-auditor in the Independent which has the multiplication factors to work out tonnes of CO2 from different sources.
  
• the Carbon Neutral website, which has a carbon calculators for most areas including a very comprehensive flights area.
• a carbon footprint calculator from a UK company called Carbon Footprint. This also gave figures for secondary (indirect) carbon consumption - carbon emissions involved in your food & drink, clothes, public services etc. These are not calculated, just average UK figures. They also gave typical values for UK households so you can see how you compare... I want to do some more digging around this, I don't know how average my secondary usage is.
  
• BP provide a very flashy carbon calculator (which gave my lowest CO2 emissions estimate - it's almost like they want you not to worry about it...).
  

The sources all gave different answers for my direct footprint, +/- 3 tonnes CO2. I've gone with the upper values to be conservative (which were from the carbon footprint site). Here are my numbers:



And in graph form... (click to enlarge)



In working this out, I was surprised by a few things:

• That our car usage (which I had always regarded as modest - mainly weekends away, 10k miles in the year) - was the single biggest contributor to my personal direct footprint, weighing in with a massive 1.4 tonnes of CO2.
  
• That my gas usage (cooking and heating) contributes 73% more CO2 than electricity.
• That our gas and electricity usage were below the national averages - probably because we are never in!

I was not surprised that my business flights (two trips to the US and two to Europe) bumped my total footprint to 75% over the UK average.

So, I've got my work cut out! The next few posts are going to cover:

• Primary personal footprint - reducing energy usage where I can.
• Primary business footprint - asking my work what they are doing to reduce unecessary flights, and offsetting necessary ones.
• Secondary footprint - finding viable choices to reduce my secondary footprint, and working out what I can do to persuade companies and the government to do the same.
• ... and offsetting the rest.