Your carbon footprint

I read an article in the paper the other day about how Sheryl Crow thinks we're an "industrious enough people to make it work with only one square per restroom visit". A Seinfeld rant cut short (and this will come to bite me in a couple of years' time when we've run out of trees), I don't think I'll ever live up to her expectations.

For example, you probably think you saved a tree by not reading this on a piece of paper. However, if you live in a city which runs on fossil fuels, like I do, your computer, airconditioner and halogen reading lamp alone were responsible for 12 pounds of CO₂ in just the time it's taken you to get to this sentence.

The EPA and climatecrisis.net provide nifty little carbon footprint calculators which factor in everything from the model of your car to what you recycle. I found my carbon footprint to be a staggering 40,500 pounds of CO₂ each year. In fact, the UAE (where I live) has the world's third highest CO₂ emissions per capita, outranking the United States and France by factors of two and five, respectively. Those of you who see recycling as just another brown brochure will also be interested to know that you can reduce your carbon footprint by up to 4,000 pounds of CO₂ each year by simply recycling.

So go on. Figure out your carbon footprint! Even the lowly burger has one.