The bad environmentalist

Paul Kingsnorth spends a lot of time urging others to change their behaviour to help save the planet. But just how great are his own ecological credentials?

I'm an environmentalist, and I'm all right. For over a decade, I have been working for what we all now call "sustainability" on both a personal and political level. It stands to reason, then, that my everyday life must be energy efficient; that I must be leaving a small and barely noticeable footprint on the planet's resources. I am, after all, supposed to be setting an example.

Needless to say, I recycle all my cans, bottles and bits of paper. I don't drive a car. I get my milk delivered in returnable glass bottles. I use energy-efficient light bulbs. I grow my own vegetables and try to buy organic food, when I can afford it. I try not to fly too much, and feel suitably guilty when I do. I use recycled paper. And so on.

But what does it all amount to? What difference am I actually making? I've told myself for years that I must be using less energy, and making less of an environmental impact, than most people in Britain. But is that true? If so, is it enough? And if not, what am I going to do about it?

There's one way to find out: I decide to submit myself to an energy audit. There are many ways of doing this, some more time-consuming and effective than others. If you want to do it really seriously, there are companies and individuals out there you can employ to audit every aspect of your life, and calculate your "ecological footprint" down to the last toenail.

But there are easier and quicker ways of doing it. I decide to use one of the many energy-audit tools found on the internet. The Carbon Calculator, created by the environ-mental magazine Resurgence (www.resurgence.org/carboncalculator/index.htm), allows you, in a few minutes, to calculate roughly how much energy you use every year, and how it compares with sustainable targets. It's worryingly easy to use - so much so that I can't help procrastinating for several hours before I start. The consequences of getting the wrong answer make me nervous.

But it has to be done: I take a deep breath and plunge in.

First we come to home energy bills: in my case, electricity and gas. This requires some digging around. Ferreting out my last electricity bill and searching through the bits I never read when I pay it, I discover that our household, which consists of me and my partner, uses about 286 kilowatt hours of electricity per month. Whatever that means. Then there's the gas bill. How many therms do I use a month? What the hell is a therm anyway? This takes some working out, but I think it's probably about 40 a month. In it goes. Passing over oil, coal and wood, and feeling good about it, I move on to the next category: personal transport.

First, car use. As a non-car owner who cycles almost everywhere, I'm feeling pretty smug about this one. Until I remember the camper van. Last year, on a curious whim, I bought an ex-ambulance, converted for use as a camper van. It runs on both petrol and liquid petroleum gas (LPG), which is a less polluting (and less expensive) fuel. Or it did, until the LPG conked out. Now it just runs on petrol, and a lot of it: a 20-year-old three-tonne van has a huge thirst for fuel. In my defence, I didn't know quite how much when I bought it. I didn't think I drove it much either, until I counted up the mileage for this experiment: 1,859 miles in the last year. Oh dear. Buses and trains follow: mostly journeys from my home in Oxford to London. In it all goes.

Then comes the big one, the one that could blow it all out of the water: plane flights, the fastest-growing contributor to climate change. Any environmentalist worth their salt would keep away from planes altogether. How many miles do I fly a year? I've deliberately never thought about it, partly because I'm vaguely aware that, in the past few years in particular, it has been far too many. I set to work calculating the miles flown over the past 12 months. The results are unpleasant.

September 2004: return flight to Australia, my girlfriend's home country. Gulp. It's about 10,000 miles. Each way. December 2004: return flight to Cyprus, where my parents now live. Another 4,500 miles. This year's total, then: 24,500 miles. Oh boy.

Next we have "industry and commerce". This is a category we might not even think of without having our attention drawn to it, and yet around half of the UK's total carbon emissions come from industry and commerce supporting our everyday lifestyles - the energy used to grow and transport food, make clothes and electrical goods, power the welfare state and all the rest of it. Following the detailed instructions, I come out with a figure of about 2.5 tonnes of carbon a year.

And suddenly, that's it: a figure appears. My personal carbon usage over the past year is . . . I can't look . . . 25.5 tonnes.

Now hang on: this can't be right. Average carbon usage in the UK is about nine tonnes per person, 11 if flights are taken into account. Mine is more than twice as high. There must be some mistake. I trawl back over the figures, desperately looking for loopholes. It makes no real difference; the total remains resolutely high. This is a disaster. I'm going to have to pull out of writing this article. I can't possibly publish this. No one will ever take me seriously again.

So what's the problem? In a word, flights. Those two trips, to Australia and Cyprus, produced just over 21 tonnes of carbon between them. Take them out of the equation and my annual budget comes in at 4.23 tonnes - less than half the national average, and a target of which a greenie could be reasonably proud. Assuming that I wanted to see my parents again, and left one annual flight to Cyprus in the mix, I would total about nine tonnes: not nearly so good, but about average.

So that's it, then: no more flights to Australia, or at least not for the next decade, and I'll be doing OK.

Except this is not the whole picture. According to George Marshall of the Climate Outreach Information Network, even an average of nine tonnes per capita is likely to be way above a long-term sustainable emissions budget. While stressing that no firm figure can be arrived upon until we know exactly what effects climate change will have, Marshall suggests that an annual carbon budget of around 2.5 tonnes each for everyone on earth is closer to a truly sustainable target.

So what do I do? For a start, I never fly again: 21.3 tonnes of carbon less every year. I sell my camper van: another third of a tonne gone. I'm down to 3.9 tonnes a year. Still not enough. I sell my computer, buy only second-hand clothes and food produced within a ten-mile radius. I stop using trains . . . It's getting silly, but also scary. This kind of exercise drives home just how over-dependent we are on carbon-based energy, and how we are going to have to beat this dependency, fast. We in the industrialised world are going to have to make major changes to our lifestyles.

If there is a heartening side to this tale, though, it is that people who are aware of what changes are needed are beginning to experiment with them already. In the past few years, I've seen or even taken part in a number of them. There are initiatives to promote the local food economy, from local farmers markets to calculations of "food miles", all aimed at reducing the vast amounts of energy used transporting food all over the globe to your table. There are community experiments such as Nottinghamshire's Sherwood Energy Village, a project in which the site of a former coal mine is being transformed into an emissions-free community. And there are thousands of small renewable energy companies springing up around the country.

There are more radical experiments, too, such as Tinker's Bubble, a small-scale low-impact farming community that has made a home for itself on a hillside in Somerset. It is attempting to create a small farming economy that uses no carbon fuel inputs at all, produces fresh local produce and satisfies its housing and most everyday needs by using the products of the landscape. None of these initiatives even comes close to tackling the energy problems we will face in the future: they are too small, too scattered, too underfunded and undersupported. But they are a start.

Some of these ideas might seem terrifying, or absurd, to many of us. But we are all going to have to face the hard facts: the way we use energy is going to have to change, radically and fast, and we're all going to have to be part of it. One thing is certain: if every "environmentalist" is as profligate as me, we've got an even bigger problem than we thought we had.

We asked some contributors to get an idea of their ecological footprint using www.earthday.net/footprint (simple if unscientific). Here's what they found . . .

Mavis Cheek Mine was a horrible result, probably exacerbated by the fact that I work in old money so have scarcely a clue about litres as opposed to gallons, nor how big my house is in square metres. But I think I worked it out fairly accurately. All the same, I am hopelessly out of order in my lifestyle, which is to do with living in the country - without a bus or train unless I drive to get them - and living in a large house. I should defend my house in that it is very warm in winter and my heating costs are relatively light - I also burn wood, though, so I guess that's bad. I'll probably go off into the woods now and shoot myself - the alternative of becoming a bicycling vegan is too dreadful to contemplate. Can I be forgiven a bit if I care for my little bit of wilderness countryside out here, far from the madding crowd? If not, the gun it is (more bloody energy), for I, alone it seems, wreck our beloved planet.

Arabella Weir My results were rather shameful - I suspect I was more brutal on myself than needs be.

Stephen Bayley My own consumption of the planet is largely restricted to renewable resources, mainly grapes, grains and wood . . . in the form of wine, bread and books. I detest both business travel and tourism. People getting on planes should not merely feel scared, but embarrassed as well. In less than half a generation, it will seem criminal to have inefficient pressurised aluminium tubes burning up the atmosphere and pushing out filth simply so someone can have a "meeting" in Frankfurt or be globally warmed on an unpleasant Thai beach. This must be stopped. Still, the answer to the world's financial problems is more technology, not less. For so long as the planet is moving, there is a reliable source of energy to be captured. And the other keynote for the future? Better, not more. Quality, not quantity.

Brian Cathcart I wasn't surprised to find myself way over the one-planet limit - in fact, some way over the two-planet threshold. I like to think it helps that I rarely travel by car, but I'm sure that effect was more than cancelled out by eight or ten air flights a year, most of which are for pleasure. Even though I take advantage of it, I regard low-cost air services as environmental insanity, and would support taxes on aviation fuel that would force most leisure travellers like me to take fewer journeys or to travel by rail.

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