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What are the best ways to shrink your carbon footprint?

Posted by cassia 
What are the best ways to shrink your carbon footprint?
November 17, 2017
Here is an article on the CBC website that discusses your carbon footprint and how to reduce it.
It does mention the horrendous impact of children, but still glosses past it to focus on other contributions that have far far less impact.

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What are the best ways to shrink your carbon footprint?

"Emma Rohmann works hard to minimize her family's contribution to climate change. She and her husband Erich, who have two young children, have retrofitted their Toronto home to be more energy efficient. They've also cut way back on eating meat, driving and flying to reduce their carbon emissions.

"Thinking about the future I'm leaving for my kids, I think my carbon footprint is something I worry about a lot," says Rohman, 33, an environmental engineer who runs Green at Home, a consulting firm that helps families and businesses make greener choices."

(snip)
"It can be hard to compare so many studies, so earlier this year, researchers at the University of British Columbia compiled data from dozens of studies to calculate the emissions from individual behaviours.

They found the four things that would have the biggest impact were:

Having one fewer child (which could reduce emissions by 58.7 tonnes of carbon per year, due to the absence of emissions that an extra person would generate over a lifetime).
Living car-free (reducing emissions by 2.4 tonnes per year).
Avoiding air travel (reducing emissions by 1.6 tonnes per transatlantic flight).
Eating a plant-based diet (reducing emissions by 0.8 tonnes per year compared to a diet that includes meat).
Lead author Seth Wynes compared those to actions recommended by sources such as governments and high school textbooks and was surprised by how different they were.

"They tended to focus on incremental behaviours instead, with smaller step-by-step benefits," Wynes said, like conserving energy through hanging clothes to dry or improving home heating and cooling efficiency."

(more at link)
http://www.cbc.ca/news/technology/carbon-footprint-choices-1.4403708
Re: What are the best ways to shrink your carbon footprint?
November 17, 2017
One fewer than what? Everything else is measurable. They don't say "Drive your car 100 days less per year than you otherwise would" or "Eat 50% less meat than you intended" or "Take 1 less flight a year" because it is incredibly obvious that in order to do these things, you need a baseline.

Well, in most developed countries the fertility rate is around 1.2. So one less child than that baseline is ZERO.

But instead they illustrate the article with a family that has two children, already above average. Such bullshit.
Re: What are the best ways to shrink your carbon footprint?
November 17, 2017
And another thing they aren't highlighting is the enormous gulf between 58.7 tonnes and 2.4 tonnes. If you do only one item on this list, it's pretty obvious which one you should do.
Re: What are the best ways to shrink your carbon footprint?
November 18, 2017
Why the fuck is it that people with kyds complain about overpopulation are they not aware they contribute to the problem?
Re: What are the best ways to shrink your carbon footprint?
November 19, 2017
Does the 58.7 tonnes take into account the reduction of emissions from the offspring's offspring, and the offspring of the offspring's offspring, and so on, and so on, and so on? The savings are exponential, of course.
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