Welcome to Ashish Pal 's World

Few days ago I wrote about India’s posi­tion in the CO2 emis­sion charts in one of my blogs titled India against the devel­op­ing coun­tries on the Global warm­ing. That time I tried to com­pare about India was low on CO2 emis­sions but it still need to cut back on it before its too late. Lot of blogs\articles have been writ­ten about Cli­mate and Global warm­ing, recently read­ing one of them I came across the term Car­bon Footprint.

As per wikipedia: A car­bon foot­print is “the total set of green­house gas (GHG) emis­sions caused by an orga­ni­za­tion, event or prod­uct” . For sim­plic­ity of report­ing, it is often expressed in terms of the amount of car­bon diox­ide, or its equiv­a­lent of other GHGs, emit­ted. The con­cept and name of the car­bon foot­print orig­i­nates from the eco­log­i­cal foot­print dis­cus­sion. The car­bon foot­print is a sub­set of the eco­log­i­cal foot­print and of the more com­pre­hen­sive Life Cycle Assess­ment (LCA). An indi­vid­ual, nation, or organization’s car­bon foot­print can be mea­sured by under­tak­ing a GHG emis­sions assessment.

When you drive a car, the engine burns fuel which cre­ates a cer­tain amount of CO2, depend­ing on its fuel con­sump­tion and the dri­ving dis­tance. (CO2 is the chem­i­cal sym­bol for car­bon diox­ide). When you heat your house with oil, gas or coal, then you also gen­er­ate CO2. Even if you heat your house with elec­tric­ity, the gen­er­a­tion of the elec­tri­cal power may also have emit­ted a cer­tain amount of CO2. When you buy food and goods, the pro­duc­tion of the food and goods also emit­ted some quan­ti­ties of CO2.

Your car­bon foot­print is the sum of all emis­sions of CO2 (car­bon diox­ide), which were induced by your activ­i­ties in a given time frame. Usu­ally a car­bon foot­print is cal­cu­lated for the time period of a year.

Given below is my Car­bon foot­print when I am in U.S. for a period of year 2009. As per this chart my total yearly car­bon foot­print equates to 2.85 tonnes, which is above the tar­get of 2 tonnes set to com­bat the cli­mate change. The best way is to cal­cu­late the car­bon diox­ide emis­sions based on the fuel con­sump­tion or there is another easy way is to use  the  web­site called www.carbonfootprint.com which gives you a com­plete analy­sis of what your car­bon foot­print is by just answer­ing some sim­ple ques­tion. It also gives you way to reduce the same.

So guys find out your car­bon foot­print and try to reduce it before its too late.