oh dear enigma one, you are teasing right?!?...if not, I don't think they sell boots in your size you big consumerist you!...oh well, i tried...:(
How big is your Ecological Footprint??...
by Frog 33 Replies latest social current
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Enigma One
Nope. Not teasing. But I fly a lot for business and live in a big house. Those seem to give you a double whammy.
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kiddotan
FOOD 1.5 MOBILITY 0.1 SHELTER 5.4 GOODS/SERVICES 4.2 TOTAL FOOTPRINT 11.2 IN COMPARISON, THE AVERAGE ECOLOGICAL FOOTPRINT IN YOUR COUNTRY IS 7.6 GLOBAL HECTARES PER PERSON.
WORLDWIDE, THERE EXIST 1.8 BIOLOGICALLY PRODUCTIVE GLOBAL HECTARES PER PERSON.IF EVERYONE LIVED LIKE YOU, WE WOULD NEED 6.2 PLANETS. BUGGER! and i recycle and grow my own veggies.
Nope. Not teasing. But I fly a lot for business and live in a big house. Those seem to give you a double whammy.
me too,
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Frog
yer, the big house thing got me too (even though I share it with 7 other grubby students!). If it was any other year my flying hours would have put me well over the limit, but fortunately this year I've been relatively grounded, so avoided the double-whammy;)
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Eyebrow2
15 footprints...given that I have 8 people living in my house...I can live with that.
These sites are neat, and I do believe everyone, including myself can do better with recycling, conserving energy, yadda, yadda, yadda...but I find sites like this tend to over simplify things.
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Enigma One
I agree Eyebrow. I only buy organic clubbed baby seal meat. I only eat bald eagle omlets twice a week. Recycle my brazilian rain forest cherry chopsticks. And pour my old oil down the sewer religiously. How can my ecological impact really be that large?
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seattleniceguy
I did this test about a year ago and of course despite my best efforts I had a wickedly Western score of something like 3 or 4 planets. However, I've been thinking about this a bit more and I believe there is a major flaw in the underlying logic.
Take a look at the guilt-inducing score line:
IF EVERYONE LIVED LIKE YOU, WE WOULD NEED 6.2 PLANETS.
Actually, that's not true. We don't have 6.2 planets. We have one planet. There is no possible way to consume 6.2 planets' worth of resources. So if everyone were actually living like this person, it would mean one of two things: 1) that the footprint calculation was wrong, or 2) that we figured out better technology that allowed everyone to live at the "6.2 planet" standard-of-living while consuming less resources.
Personally, I believe that both will probably be true. Since politics are necessarily involved, the numbers are probably inflated. At the very least, when in doubt, they probably erred on the side of more resource consumption.
But think about the problem from a simple supply-and-demand viewpoint. The supply is set in stone. There is only so much resource availability. As demand grows (as it is in developing nations, especially India and China), the way the pie is sliced will change, but the total resource consumption can never exceed exactly 1.0 planets' worth. Since the already-developed world will not want to accept a decrease in standard-of-living, it will force us to find new and better technologies.
It's kind of like those dire predictions you read all the time in news magazines: "At the current rate of destruction, there will be no ozone layer left by the year 2005." If you look at 20-year-old copies of Time or Newsweek, you're certain to find scores of such predictions that didn't actually occur. The reason is simply that the reality forces us to change our rate of consumption/destruction/etc.
Obviously, consumer activism and education is one important way of changing our consumption habits. But I think that simple supply and demand will work much more effectively (and without the need for coordinated intervention) to accomplish the same thing in the long run.
SNG <------------ of the "one planet" class
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doofdaddy
I agree SeattleNG
The site is raising money, so all who do the test are being put to the torch so you feel guilty.
I live in a house made from mudbrick off the site. All the timber in the house came from clearing the site. Solar power, tank water, drive a 50 MPG car, do bush regeneration on weekends, veggie garden, meat once a week and I "use" 2 and a half planets.
The questions are too vague and simplistic.
Sounds like the wt articles.....
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Frog
The questions are too vague and simplistic.
Sounds like the wt articles.....
yer right!...look now's who's exaggerating?!
Clearly those calculators don't take a great many factors into consideration, that's really quite obvious, and naturally they're configured to be highly conservative. It depends where the benchmarks is set, and whether you're coming from a conservationist perspective. My belief is that quite clearly we haven't implemented smart technologies to have us living in harmony with the environment that supports us. Sure the benchmark in these tests is set high, but I argue that it should be.
The fact is that sure environmental hotspots like depleted ozone, global warming, dimming, rainforest depletion, oceans overfished, coral bleaching etc, have all been hypothesised about for decades now, and predictions haven't always been entirely accurate, but surely the point is that while the risks we can take cannot be measured surely the intelligent thing to do is to be conservative.
Sorry SNG, but your comments sound like those of the bogus in denial climatologists working for the big fossil fuel lobbies of the US.
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seattleniceguy
Hey Frog,
The fact is that sure environmental hotspots like depleted ozone, global warming, dimming, rainforest depletion, oceans overfished, coral bleaching etc, have all been hypothesised about for decades now, and predictions haven't always been entirely accurate, but surely the point is that while the risks we can take cannot be measured surely the intelligent thing to do is to be conservative.
My point is not that the predictions are inaccurate. The reason they don't come true is that the realities force us to change. Case in point: The November 2005 Scientific American contains an article on the ozone hole. It is no longer growing. Awesome news! In response to the situation, we changed, so (fortunately) the dire forecasts of death and destruction will not come to pass.
Humans only change in very large ways when the situation requires them to. We aren't going to stop using oil until it's not cost-effective anymore. We're starting to approach that point now, which is spurring an intense drive for the next fuel source. Again, this is very cool. And it's a simple product of supply and demand.
When more people consume limited resources, there are fewer resources available for everyone. China and India ramping up their oil use takes away oil from the US. It doesn't invoke another planet and start sucking oil from there.
The test doesn't seem to take this into account. We have only one pie. The way it gets sliced is changing. Ironically, increased consumption from developing countries is hastening our need to move to a new energy source.
Sorry SNG, but your comments sound like those of the bogus in denial climatologists working for the big fossil fuel lobbies of the US.
Well, I think you're misreading me. Clearly, there are some big challenges ahead of us. But a variety of factors are converging which give me hope that things are going to work out: The developing world is developing. The global economy is lifting nations out of poverty. The internet is bringing education and information to the world. And our oil is running out.
In the long term, I think we will see fossil fuels as the necessary evil that powered us into the technology and information age. Fortunately, we got there just about the time we ran out of fossil fuels. Fortunately, because of the technology and information that the fossil fuels brought about, we had enough smart people thinking about the problem that we were able to transition into the next fuel source before we completely ran out of steam.
I guess I see it as inevitable that we will change and that the entire world will, within this century, be living at the quality of life that the Western world enjoys.
SNG