Published on Guardian Unlimited
THIS IS the last entry for this project so it's time to look back. I started out a climate-change sceptic(ish), quickly became a zealot and crashed into doomsayer mode after a couple of months. Now, thanks mainly to going on the climate change march in London, I'm back on an even keel.
The speeches, the bright sunny day, the carnival atmosphere, the route that took us past Bentley, Rolls Royce and Land Rover showrooms, the variety of people, the odd "celeb" (ok, Peter Tatchell was all) combined to make the day slowly uplifting.
Christophe Rubach, a Californian native in his 40s who's lived in Stroud for a decade, was typical. He carried a small stove-pipe in his backpack, smoking merrily away with incense. He was promoting his recent conversion to wood-burning stoves - relabeled as a bio-fuel stove these days.
His new Clearview stove burns so efficiently, he told me, "there's no smoke and the flame goes blue." It heats all the rooms in the house except one. And the wood? "I get it out of skips." He's slashed a good few tonnes a year from his family's carbon footprint, not to mention saving a fair amount of money. Green is good, green makes sense, was the general message of the march.
Back in August I worked out my carbon footprint was 19 tonnes. That was due to an uninsulated house and flying to Brazil, round South America and back. Now, due to insulation, switching to ecotricity and not having any long-haul flights planned, it's much less. According to the same carbon calculators I used before, and estimating transport for next year, including - realistically - two European short-haul flights, it's two tonnes. Add a two tonne allowance for "background CO2" in clothing, packaging and food-miles, and my new total is four tonnes - less than half the UK national average of 9.5tonnes.
Being carbon sensitive has made me much more aware of my food too, and where it comes from. And those "should be organic" feelings common to many have been translated into reality. I now buy better food, a fair amount of it from a Sunday farmers' market (it is actually as cheap if not cheaper than Sainsbury's), and less of it. I have started to enjoy planning, cooking and eating more, because food shopping is not such a drag now. I am looking forward to spending my £14 on an organic farmers'-market chicken instead of a steroid-filled sack of turkey flesh from the supermarket for Christmas dinner.
So I have made significant changes, and all for the good. It is not always easy being green, and it does take a bit of effort to think about it and make adjustments. But pretty soon you find you're factoring it into everything you do, every choice you make.
But what of my final few tonnes? Can I neutralize them and turn my total into zero? The idea is attractive: invest a few pounds in a carbon offset scheme - forestry in Kenya, wind turbines for an Indian village, insulating a school in Devon - and sit back, happy that you have done your bit.
But the debate is fierce. On the one hand, goes the argument, these schemes are as much about profit as they are the environment. How do we know the money goes where they say it does, and that the schemes are well managed? It would be naïve to invest in them and we should simply cut our carbon to zero: no flying, no fossil fuels.
On the other hand, there are those who say that people won't stop using fossil fuels, and that well-run carbon offset schemes have a positive effect and engage the public too. The Co-operative group, for example, has started to build their own wind farms from carbon-offset funds. Surely that can't be bad?
I have a leg in both camps. I can see the point of the antis, and sympathise hopefully with the can't-be-bad camp too. It's a minefield out there - one man's carbon-offset forest in Africa is another man's traditional family grazing for his cattle. The answer is to research it: before offsetting find out where the money is going, who the scheme is run by and who it is supported by. Then make a decision as best you can.
And don't just offset and feel guilt-free: make the leap and go as carbon-friendly as you can. Yes, it takes commitment and a genuine, though not radical, change in behaviour. But you will probably come to the same conclusion as me: at the end of the day, there isn't really any other choice.
Websites this week
Campaign against climate change (London march)
www.campaigncc.org
Wood burning stoves
www.clearviewstoves.com
It's not easy...
www.itsnoteasybeinggreen.org
Carbon offset podcast debate at the RSA (21MB)
www.thersa.org/audio/
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