A FEW YEARS AGO I agreed to go around a supermarket with a journalist who wanted to write an article on low-carbon food. We trailed up and down the aisles with the Dictaphone running, and she plied me with questions, most of which I was pitifully unable to answer.
“What about these bananas?... How about this cheese?... It’s organic. That must be better... isn’t it?... Or is it?... Lettuce must be harmless, right?... Should we have come here by bus?... At least we didn’t fly! How big a deal is food, anyway?”
It was not at all clear what the carbon-conscious shopper should do. There was clearly a huge gap in the available consumer knowledge, and, on that day, we couldn’t fill it. The article never happened, and it’s probably just as well. Since then I have looked long and hard into all kinds of carbon footprints and carried out numerous studies, including one for a supermarket chain.
This book is here to answer that journalist’s questions, and many more besides. It’s not just a book about food and travel. I want to give you a sense of the carbon impact—that is, the climate change impact—of everything you do and think about. I want to give you a carbon instinct. Although I have discussed the footprint of just under one hundred items, I hope by the time you have read about these you will have gained such a sense of where carbon impacts come from that you will be able to make a reasonable guesstimate of the footprint of more or less anything and everything that you come across. It won’t be exact, but I hope you’ll at least be able to get the number of zeros right most of the time. There are messages in this book for ordinary people, some for businesses, and a few sprinkled in for policy makers too.
Some basic assumptions
I’m hoping I can take three things for granted:
> climate change is a big deal;
> it’s caused by humans,
> and we can do something about it.
However, out of respect for the still-widespread confusion over these assumptions, I have put more about them in an appendix in case you want to check them out before moving on.
Perspective
A friend recently asked me how he should best dry his hands to reduce his carbon footprint—with a paper towel or with an electric hand drier. The same person flies across the Atlantic literally dozens of times a year. A sense of scale is required here. The flying is tens of thousands of times more important than the hand drying. So my friend was simply distracting himself from the issue. I want to help you get a feel for roughly how much carbon is at stake when you make simple choices—where you travel, how you get there, whether to buy something, whether to leave the TV on standby, and so on.
Picking battles
I’m not trying to give you a list of 500 things you can do to help save the planet.1 You could probably already write that list yourself. You will find at least 500 possibilities in here, but this is a book about helping you work out where you can get the best return for your effort. This book is here to help you pick your battles. If you enjoy the read and by the end of it have thought of a few things that can improve your life while cutting a decent chunk out of your carbon, then I’ll be happy. The book isn’t here to tell you what to do or how radical to be. Those are personal decisions.
Is carbon like money?
In one sense, yes it is.
Carbon is just like money in that you can’t manage it unless you understand it, at least in broad terms. Most of the time we know how much things cost without looking at the price tag. I don’t mean that we have an exact picture, but we know that a bottle of champagne is more expensive than a cup of tea but a lot cheaper than a house. So most of us don’t buy houses on a whim. Our financial sense of proportion allows us to make good choices. If I really want champagne, I know I can have it, provided that somewhere along the line I cut out something just as expensive that is less important to me. Our carbon instinct needs to be just like the one we have for managing our money.
That’s where the similarity ends. Unlike with money, we are not used to thinking about carbon costs. It’s also much harder to tell how much we are spending because we can’t see it and it’s not written down. Furthermore, unlike what happens when we spend a lot of money, we don’t personally experience the consequences of our carbon impact because it’s spread across nearly seven billion people and many years.
Enjoy the read
These pages are written for people who want to love their lives and for whom that now entails having some carbon awareness alongside everything else that matters to them.
Dip in. Keep this book by the loo. Read it from cover to cover or flit around. Use it as a reference if you like. Talk about it. Take issue with it. Let me know how it could be improved (info@howbadarebananas.com). Think of it like an early map, full of inaccuracies but better, I hope, than what you had before.
If there’s something else to be gleaned from the book, it is that nearly all of us, including me, have plenty of junk in our lives that contributes nothing at all to the quality of our existence. It’s deep in our culture. Cutting that out makes everyone’s life better, especially our own. I got a big win by swapping my solo car commutes for bike rides and carpools. That works for me, but I’m not prescribing that particular solution for you, because we are all different. I hope you enjoy the read and that, while you are at it, you bump into at least something you can use.
So how bad are bananas?
As it happens, they turn out to be a fine low-carbon food, though not totally free from sustainability issues to keep an eye on—see A banana.