Carbon cost of Christmas dinner

After the good news about researchers working on solving our Christmas wrapping problems comes the negative news of research into the carbon footprint of our Christmas dinner! Academics calculated the production, processing and transportation costs of the festive ingredients and announced that a combined carbon footprint equivalent to 6,000 car journeys around the world will be produced by the UK population eating their Christmas dinner. The worst offender is cranberry sauce, as the importing the cranberries from the US contributes up to half the carbon footprint related to transport. So, maybe the best gift to request this Christmas is the carbon offset option.

A virtual postcard

When Phil posted on offsetting carbon emissions, I commented that, even if we flew to our holiday destination, at least we were staying in a car-free village. This is no hardship when you can slow down and gaze at the spectacular mountain panorama without fear of getting run over (though you do need to dodge the electric cars and the village goats).

We've enjoyed worshipping at St Peter's Church; the ICS Find a Church facility helped us track it down last year. There is even an informal mid-week Mountain Praise service. Some of the mountains have plaques with Bible verses on them - usually in German but here's one in English.

Offset your Holiday Carbon and Support Developing Countries

Summer is a time when we use less energy for heating and lighting but more for travel as we go on holiday, and increasingly perhaps more for cooling. Whilst avoiding and reducing the associated carbon emissions in various ways is the best approach, the unavoidable emissions can be cancelled out quickly by investing in zero carbon energy systems. Where such systems are implemented in developing countries there is a double benefit.

A range of companies and organisations now offer offset schemes. The most effective only invest in zero carbon energy systems, not tree planting. The Pure Clean Planet Trust is one of these. It is also attractive because it is a charity, and caps the proportion of offsetting donations it receives which it uses for its own costs. It therefore contrasts with commercial companies whose aim might be to maximise profits.

Pure is just beginning to invest in projects, and the first one is a large local power station in India using unused parts of crops such as coconuts and sugar cane. It supplies almost zero carbon electricity for about 10,000 people in 47 villages.

Average CO2 emissions for cars in the UK in 2006 were 274 grams per mile. A holiday involving say 1,000 miles in total would therefore emit 274 kg of carbon dioxide – probably a bit more if the car was fully loaded. The typical cost of offsetting this mileage is around £5 or less.

More information on Pure can be found at http://www.puretrust.org.uk/. There may be similar carbon offset organisations to Pure.