I made an awful discovery today about my carbon footprint. After I read about the new Toronto edition of the Zerofootprint calculator, I decided to register and try it out to calculate my CO2 emissions for the past year. The result? 15.7 tonnes. According to Zerofootprint, the average Canadian emits 10.1 tonnes and the average Torontonian emits 8.6 tonnes. There's probably a selection bias in there because Wikipedia lists per capita emissions in Canada at 20 tonnes as of 2004.
15.7 tonnes is still way too high for me, though. I bike or walk everywhere in the city and I rarely drive. I take transit maybe once a week when I'm lazy. The problem is that I logged approximately 35,000 km (21,748 mi) of personal air travel last year, which according to Zerofootprint, has resulted in over 11 tonnes of CO2 emissions. My friends and family are scattered about and I traveled pretty frequently last year to see them (and, um, to go skiing). Here's where my total of 15.7 is coming from:
This doesn't include the 1300 liters (343 gallons) of gasoline I burned through in my UHaul when I moved from Seattle to Toronto. Although this was an exceptional case, it added another whopping 40 tonnes to my emissions last year.
I knew that air travel was pretty bad in terms of emissions, but I had no idea it was so bad. The David Suzuki Foundation has a nice article on air travel and includes a chart that shows how air travel compares with other forms of transport on CO2 emissions. Essentially, airplanes are the worst contributor to emissions of all forms of travel. Sigh. When is someone going to invent that magic human teleporter thingy that I keep dreaming of?
