introduction
Sharing the remaining Global Carbon Budget equally between everyone on the earth.
Giving us each a Personal Carbon Budget.
Giving us each a Personal Carbon Budget.
Endorsements
"This is a revealing - and sobering - tool that shows us the predicament we're in;
hopefully it will help people shift in a more sustainable direction."
- Bill McKibben, founder of 350.org, the first planet-wide, grassroots climate change movement and named as “probably America’s most important environmentalist.”
"It is really helpful to be able to highlight this the way you propose."
- Corinne Le Quéré, Professor of Climate Change Science and Policy at the University of East Anglia and Director of the Tyndall Centre for Climate Change
"I was thinking of this too yesterday. It is a very good concept"
- Sir David MacKay, FRS - Chief Scientific Adviser to the UK Department of Energy and Climate Change (DECC) 2009 to 2014
Here's a 57 minute presentation on the concept by Peter Land www.youtube.com
We don't countSo there is a budget, but we don't know how much it is, how much we are using now and how much we can change.
We really need to learn to count CO2. Otherwise we are going into this blindfolded. |
Where do these figures come from?Basically, the remaining, per person budget is obtained by taking the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) budget and dividing by the global population. For more detail, discussion and alternatives, see methodology.
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So what now?At some point there will be a snazzy app to easily enter your current lifestyle and experiment with different options for designing your descent to a sustainable life.
Until then here's a work in progress excel spreadsheet. Feel free to use and improve. |
a thank you
Really sadly, it's too late to say this. But I want to say thank you to David MacKay for providing inspiration through his book and for always, even when dying of cancer, answering all our questions. Both about this concept as a whole and about the biomass intricacies that came from exploring his BeaC calculator.
Although I didn't know him any more than through emails and reading his work, I feel sad and shocked to lose him. He'd never mentioned why the emails usually got sent at 2am.
He was supportive, honest, engaging and enthusiastic.