Road to Personal Net Zero: Start Here

Table of Contents

Road to Personal Net Zero - This article is part of a series.

Part : Road to Personal Net Zero: Offsetting Lifecycle Carbon Emissions from Flying

Part : This Article

I know I might never reach Net Zero, but here’s to trying.
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Why
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Climate change will throw some countries into crises, and it can completely erase some countries from the map. COP26 showed that America will not follow through with its pledge to sufficiently help repair the damages suffered by countries under human-amplified global warming, which America signed off on with a fat John Hancock. On the flip side, we did contribute some 6% of the Least Developed Countries Fund, and maybe next year we’ll come back to COP27 with a bigger check.

I like to complain about big business and politicians being slow to the mark, but that doesn’t go anywhere, because none of the people I have the attention of are big businessmen or politicians. And who am I to complain while I continue to fly for fun and buy single-use plastics for convenience?

With my own hypocrisy staring me in the face, I am setting out to offset my past and present carbon emissions.

How
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It will be extremely difficult and time-consuming to calculate my exact carbon footprint across every category of housing, transportation, services, food, and goods, but there are myriad decent estimation tools to simplify this.

Transportation accounts for the brunt of my current annual emissions. Source: Wren.co calculator.

A nice breakdown of emission sources, further broken down at: PBS

Past Emissions
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The main challenge will be accounting for all of my past emissions and lifestyle. For example, the way I buy and hold onto clothing has changed since I was a kid, when the main reason to get new clothing was my growing body. And whereas before, I used to be shuttled everywhere by my parents, now I take a variety of modes of transportation.

Compensation
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Carbon offsets are controversial tool, and many people even consider the concept of paying someone else to clean up after your mess a distracting ruse. I agree; my philosophy is that you can only really fix the climate problem by disassembling the carbon-emitting system and retrofitting it with sustainable parts in-place. But compensation and and fixing are two different things, and while carbon offsets do reduce the amount of carbon in the atmosphere, I’ll start with cleaning up my own emissions.