bigfoot

With all the talk of muddy footprints over the last few days, I thought it would be interesting to do some footprint detection of my own.

I started with the big footprint of Prince Charles. That's Carbon footprint, which he quotes as the princely size of 3,421 tonnes of Carbon Dioxide. Quite a lot. A Ford Mondeo weighs 1.5 tonnes. So that carbon footprint is around the weight of 2,280 cars, or 6.25 cars weight of CO2 per day.

I separately calculated rashbre central's output, which is roughly one per cent of the Prince's figure, including all of rashbre central's travel and air mileage.

This makes me wonder if its actually understated for the Prince, who doesn't seem to mind using helicopters and chauffeured cars driving in parallel to his own train journey.

Next, I looked at the cost, for rashbre central of creating some sustainable forestry as a full offset. I selected reforestation of a small part of the Great Rift Valley, in Kenya, where a modest sum can fully offset the CO2 emission. At one level, being thoughtful can help reduce the original number(lights off etc), at another level, doing something in an area where the money makes a big difference can create a personal offset.

So do you want to have a look at your own carbon footprint profile? its right here

And the science part? A litre of gasoline(petrol) weighs around a kilo. 87% is carbon and the rest hydrogen. When the gasoline burns, the carbon fuses with oxygen (atomic weights 12C+16O+16O= 44CO2 or 44/12=3.7x as much), so the weight of the litre of gasoline becomes 87% of 3.7 times as much in CO2 emission terms (3.2 times as heavy).