Day one - cycling / walking to and from work everyday

For the first post I am going to choose an obvious solution: to replace my journeys on public transport to work by walking or cycling. According to this map (here) my journey to work is 2.84 miles by train and 3.7 miles by tube. This, according to www.carbonfootprint.com, produces 0.01 tonnes of carbon dioxide per week. Therefore it would take just over 400 days of cycling or walking to work to replace the carbon used in our plane journeys. I have recently bought a bike and I am planning to one day cycle to work but not right now so I think I'll shelve this idea. Another argument against this could be that the trains, buses and tubes would still run regardless of whether I got them or not, and would still produce the same amount of carbon dioxide, I would just have the guilt removed slightly.

Travel and our carbon footprint

I feel we are pretty good at keeping our carbon footprint to a minimum. We consciously don't leave electrical appliances on standby and as a vegan and a vegetarian we avoid the contribution to the world's carbon footprint which is made through livestock farming amongst other things. Livestock farming is a particularly large producer of carbon dioxide and other greenhouse gases as not only do its animals, production methods and transportation of its products from farm to abattoir to plate produce a large carbon footprint, the production of soya beans for use in animal feed along with cattle ranchers “alone will destroy 40 per cent of Amazon rainforest by 2050,” (Friend's of the Earth, What's feeding our food? The environmental and social impacts of the livestock sector, p.13). However, one of the major bugbears of climate changes activists – airline travel – became a necessity as we flew to Switzerland for a wedding. Yes, we could have travelled overground but due to the constraints of work we had to fly.

Our flights to Geneva and back for B and I, and B's brother produced (according to the carbon footprint calculator at www.carbonfootprint.com) 0.86 tonnes of carbon dioxide. I know there are numerous companies which offer the chance to offset your carbon footprint (0.86 tonnes can be offset for around £20) but as George Monbiot says:

“Any scheme that persuades us we can carry on polluting delays the point at which we grasp the nettle of climate change and accept that our lives have to change. But we cannot afford to delay. The big cuts have to be made right now, and the longer we leave it, the harder it will be to prevent runaway climate change from taking place. By selling us a clean conscience, the offset companies are undermining the necessary political battle to tackle climate change at home. They are telling us that we don’t need to be citizens; we need only be better consumers. “ (here)

Therefore I thought I would look at some alternative ways to offset the carbon footprint created by this journey. B's brother cycles to work everyday so I will discount his share as he will be able to burn off the carbon produced after half a year or so of cycling to and from work each day. That leaves us with 0.5733 tonnes of carbon to replace. So each day this week I will hopefully discuss a different possible solution and then come to some sort of conclusion at the end of the week.