How Bad are Bananas? The Carbon Footprint of Everything

"Here’s a bit of light relief from the hardcore end of the discussion. How Bad are Bananas? was written by Mike Berners-Lee, whose job is to help businesses understand the carbon footprint of individual products. If Chris Goodall’s book is looking at technological solutions, this is looking at more lifestyle based solutions – lifestyle decisions that might be made by individuals or considered by the government. Astonishingly, until this book came out there was no good survey of the carbon impact of different activities and objects. It’s always been easy to know the carbon footprint of fossil fuels, but what’s much more complicated is to work out the carbon footprint of, say, a bottle of wine. There is this huge debate about how much carbon emission making that bottle of wine generates. Actually it’s an impossible question to answer precisely. He gives a sensible approximation relative to other things, from sending a text message to burning down an acre of rain forest. The book is arranged, in carbon terms, from the cheapest to the costliest, and it’s full of fascinating counterintuitive facts. We’re aware, for example, of the huge carbon cost of flying, but nobody would have thought that two people chatting on mobile phones for an hour a day for a year would be equivalent to a flight from London to New York . Or to go for a more colourful, if less likely, example: if you fuelled a cycle trip with air-freighted asparagus from Israel – about the most carbon-intensive food per calorie there is – you might as well have traveled by car."