Monday, December 03, 2007

Footprints

I was listening to the news about the start of the Bali conference on climate change today. It is supposed to be the start of a new round of negotiations for a Kyoto II type of plan. Unfortunately, cynic that I am, it will probably go nowhere just like Kyoto did, since the major polluters will simply not sign on.
What I did find strange was that 10000 representatives from 180 nations will be flying to Bali for a conference on climate change... Hmmmm... does anyone see the incongruity of it? Using Google I found a site called climatecare.org that has a calculator for the carbon footprint engendered by flying from one place to another. I then took three capitals from each continent and figured out the number of tonnes of CO2 for one person flying from each one, return from Bali. Taking an average I then multiplied by the number of delegates. The average number of tonnes is 2.93333 per person. There are about 10000 people, therefore the conference will produce 2.93333 x 10000 = 29333.3 tonnes of CO2. (This figure is probably a very conservative estimate) To make it more concrete, that is equivalent to 5867 cars with a fuel efficiency of 9l/100 km driving 24000 km per year (for you Americans that is 26 miles/gallon driving 15000 miles per year). All this for climate change, hummm a teensy bit ironic n'est-ce pas?

6 comments:

geewits said...

And my, oh my, aren't they so interested in climate change? Hell, I'd take a free trip to Bali for a conference on spiders. And I HATE spiders!

Jazz said...

LOL.. oh yeah, the irony of it. Why not do it by video conference? And that's not accounting for all the pollution and they will generate once they get there.

choochoo said...

Climate changes... I'm just very glad I don't have to be Dutch in 25 years of so, the way it's all going...

Tai said...

That's funny. I just read an article about David Suzuki. His daughter is raggin' him for flying to speaking engagements, so he's trying to figure out if he can video-conference most of them for exactly that reason!

Ian Lidster said...

Lovely slice of irony, but can you feature the big boys and girls giving up a flight to Bali all in the name of our collective carbon footprint? After all, they're doing it for us -- aren't they? Aren't they?

Dr. Deb said...

Indeed.

Boy, I sure wish I new how to say that in french.