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Mar 14

Carbon diets: Meet the people living ultra low-carbon lifestyles and cutting down emissions – inews

Diets that Work Comments Off on Carbon diets: Meet the people living ultra low-carbon lifestyles and cutting down emissions – inews

NewsEnvironmentMadeleine Cuff meets the individuals rationing everything from showers to sausages to meet strict, self-imposed carbon budgets

Friday, 13th March 2020, 8:45 pm

After speaking to them all I decided I had to give a carbon diet a go. I start out with the aim of targeting the one tonne a year, which gives me a daily budget of 2.74kg of carbon to play with.

But I quickly realised Ive blown my days budget just going into the office. The return journey, which involves a train and tube ride each way, adds up to about 3.6kg of emissions. Add my morning shower into the mix, which is about six minutes long and 180g of carbon, and Ive already overshot by an entire kilo.

Thats just the start. As a journalist, I spend most of my day firing off emails, talking on the phone, and researching stories on the web. All that data use adds up to just over 1kg of carbon. Im vegetarian, so breakfast, lunch and dinner only add up to about 1.3kg of carbon. It could go a bit lower without the cheese, but not by much.

At home, I have a renewable electricity supply. But my gas heating is coming on for about three hours a day at this time of year, clocking up 1.8kg of carbon, and washing up after dinner eats up another 540g.

Could you live on a low carbon diet?

All in all, I blow way past the 2.7kg target, hitting 8.5kg for the day. That doesnt even include regular tasks like running a load of laundry. And the strange thing is that the things I counted as green, like using a reusable coffee cup, actually have very little impact on my carbon footprint. If I want to go ultra low carbon, it will take more than avoiding plastic waste.

The next day I try again. I turn off the heating and survive with just a hot water bottle. I trim my shower down to three minutes. But Im too scared to cycle through London traffic to work so I still get the train, and I still have to do my job, so my data use stays the same.

Still, I shave about 1kg off my daily total. If I replicated that for the whole year, Id be living a 2.7 tonne lifestyle. Not bad.

But if I adopted a long-term carbon diet I would quickly run into some polluting problems. Although I have cut down on how much I fly, I still do jet off a few times a year for work and holidays. That would have to go.

Meanwhile, my parents live down in Cornwall, so I criss-cross the country quite a bit on trains to stay in touch. Those visits would be tricky, even on a 2.5 tonne budget for the year. But if Im honest, Im not sure if I would ever be willing to give them up.

Living on a carbon diet shows that personal choices like how much heating you use, what you eat, and how you travel, are a major factor in how large your carbon footprint gets. But its also a reminder that for most people, the carbon impact of going to work or heating their home is beyond their control. To go ultra low carbon, well need to change systems like what powers our buses and trains, as well as our lifestyles.

Meet the carbon dieters

Rosalind Readhead, climate activist and independent London Mayoral candidate, London

Living on one tonne of carbon for the year, starting September 2019

Six months ago I started an experiment to live on one tonne of carbon for the year, the amount experts think should be the global per person average from 2050. That breaks down to a daily carbon budget of about 2.7kg a day.

What really surprised me was the carbon impact of public transport. I live in London, and going to Oxford Street and back on the tube is 900g. That is really taking up a hefty amount of my daily budget. So Ive been walking and cycling a lot more.

When I started the lifestyle in the autumn it was great because it was harvest time. I was eating virtually all plant-based food and having really good food. But as it got into winter the tomatoes go, the peppers go, and it became more stressful.

Some of the vegans have really come down hard on me because Im not completely vegan. But I had to have some cheese in my life. I have worked out that 25g of cheese, if the rest of my meal is plant-based, is doable. And Ive my milk consumption down from four pints to two pints a week.

After a month or so of researching you get an instinct for judging how many grams of carbon something is. Its a bit like calorie counting. And anything you can pick is a carbon freebie. I have a quince tree in the garden which did quite well this year, and every quince I pick off that tree is a carbon freebie.

Im halfway through the experiment and Ive been through quite a long winter. If I was to do this project for the long term, I would need to upgrade my heating system, as I cant really use it at the moment. Im using the showers at my local lido to wash three times a week, and limiting how much heating I use to do the washing up.

The first thing I will want to do at the end of the year is get out of London. I might have to break my budget because I think it will be really hard to spend the whole year here. I want to go to the beach in Devon this summer. I can get there by public transport, but I worked out that getting there is about 12 or 13 days of my budget. We really need to decarbonise public transport.

Lloyd Alter, Design editor of Treehugger.com, Toronto, Canada

Living on an annual carbon budget of 2.5 tonnes since January 2020

A lot of people say personal actions doesn't matter because it's all the big corporations, the electrical companies, giant conglomerates that are putting out all the carbon. But we are their customers! We are buying what they are selling.

For my low-carbon year I very quickly decided that I wouldnt count every cup of tea and every latte. All of those things are really rounding errors.They dont ultimately make a huge amount of difference

The three big items are housing, food and travel. A few years ago I downsized significantly, I cut my house into a duplex and I live in the ground floor and rent out the upper floors. I cycle almost everywhere, and hardly ever eat red meat - although my son is a cheesemonger so that makes cutting out cheese tricky.

My big lesson from my first month of doing this was that its a bit elitist. You can only do this kind of thing if you are lucky enough that you can work from home. That you are rich enough that you can buy a nice e-bike like I did. If I had a normal job downtown, it would be impossible for me to do.

But it hasnt all gone to plan. I had to fly to New York last month to meet the new owners of the website where I work. Basically it was equivalent to 31 days of my carbon budget. And last week my daughter had a birthday party and her husband cooked steak. I havent had steak for months, and just that meal blew two days worth of carbon budget. These are really hard choices that we all have to make.

I couldnt even possibly get close to doing one tonne. Ive picked a target at 2.5 tonnes, that basically if you dont drive, you dont fly, you dont eat red meat, and you dont live in a vast house in the suburbs, then you can actually accomplish it.

Peter Kalmus, climate scientist, California

Living on two tonnes a year

In 2009 I looked at my own emissions. Before I sat down and ran the numbers I had no idea that flying was going to be the dominant source of my emissions. I was flying a lot because I was a scientist and was going to lots of conferences and meetings, and it added up to 75 per cent of my emissions.

Back then my annual emissions added up to about 20 metric tonnes. Im now living on two tonnes a year of emissions.

The main change for me was to stop flying. My last flight was in 2012. I got on the plane and it felt really wrong, I felt like I was stealing from my kids. But if there were carbon free planes I would definitely start flying again

The second biggest change was to switch from a regular diet to a plant-based diet, which I did in stages. That was pretty easy for me.

And I dont drive in fossil fuel cars anymore because it feels really gross to me. But thats easy now because electric cars are available. We have a Tesla and a Nissan Leaf at home.

We use 100 per cent renewable electricity, which just means that our electricity bill is a little higher every month. We do still use natural gas. Thats something that I havent managed to fix yet, although I have plans for using heat pumps which run on electricity.

The further down you go the harder it gets. I have found it quite easy to go to two tonnes per year. To cut that in half again would be very difficult. You could do it, but you're going to be in your own little world and other people are going to think that you are a bit of a nutter, and they wont follow you. So I dont advocate for people to go crazy to try to go down to one metric tonne a year or even lower than that.

You can get obsessed about this. The point is that we need systems change. We need collective change. By reducing our own footprint we express emergency, and that I think helps push for collective change that we need.

Read more from the original source:
Carbon diets: Meet the people living ultra low-carbon lifestyles and cutting down emissions - inews

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