Your Carbon Emissions
In today's society, every item we consume is created by an industrial process, and hence has greenhouse gas emissions associated with it. Not just your car and your electricity and gas but everything:
- Your clothes.
- The computer on your desk.
- The furniture on which you sit.
- The food that you eat (unless it was grown, harvested and transported entirely by hand).
- The products you buy.
- The government services you consume (e.g. roads, health services, defence).
Everything we consume has greenhouse gas emissions associated with it. Below is a graphic that shows the 1999 allocation of greenhouse gas emissions to end user sectors in Australia. This is from Australia's National Greenhouse Gas Inventory 1990, 1995 and 1999, End Use Allocation of Emissions. See Table S3 Allocation of emissions to end use sectors (1999).
Living Sustainably - Offsetting your GHG Emissions
The diagram linked to the icon on the left tells you where Australia's emissions are made, how they are made, and offers tips as to how to reduce the emissions caused by living a modern lifestyle in Australia.
For detailed references for the above table, visit the Carbopedia Country Emissions Page.
How to Remove your CO2 footprint
The only way to avoid Greenhouse emissions would be to go live in a cave without power or heat (no little camp fires allowed!) and make everything (I mean everything!) by hand; You can't have any livestock either as one tonne of methane contributes to the greenhouse effect as much as 21 tonnes of carbon dioxide!
Living in a cave, while an adventure perhaps, is not exactly plausible. The alternative is to remove the greenhouse gases from the atmosphere in the short term while trusting that, globally, people are working to develop new, more Earth-friendly technologies in the mid to long term.
Carbon credits empower anyone to take ownership of their personal greenhouse emissions. By purchasing a subscription of sufficient carbon credits you can eliminate your personal impact on the greenhouse effect.