As regular readers may remember I recently announced my plans to do a birding “Big Year” in 2008 (see ““The Old Friends, New Friends World Tour 2008″). Everything is progressing towards making a flying start (see what I did there? No? I work for an airline…’flying start’? Oh well, I tried) to 2008, but there has been something niggling me: flying round the world to count birds isn’t exactly the most environmentally-friendly thing I could do next year. This will hardly be bombshell news to most eco-aware 10,000 Birds readers - or indeed to me. In fact it reminded me of an email I was once sent by a friend of mine in response to a post I wrote about the breeding grounds of the endangered Nordmann’s Greenshank on Sakhalin Island being destroyed by oil and gas exploration. He entitled it “…hardly carbon neutral”…

To quote from a part of his (slightly tongue-in-cheek, I hope) mail:

“I’ve racked my brain but I can’t really think of a single UK birder who is likely to be further from carbon neutral (or whatever stupid jargon we’re supposed to use these days) or contributes more to depleting our precious reserves of fossil fuels than one Mr C Moores - the one who criss-crosses the globe all year on jumbos, the one who ploughs up and down the M4 between Wiltshire and Heathrow umpteen times a year in a GTI (forgive me if it isn’t a GTI but whatever it is it isn’t economical or ‘kind’ to the environment)…”

He had a point then, and he would undoubtedly have a point now if he were to send the same email again. I try and do what I can to be “green” and support conservation whenever I can, but there’s no getting away from it - every time I go abroad birding with my airline job I am participating in the burning of a huge amount of fuel, and the consequent production of a massive amount of carbon emissions.

 

How much? Well, I’ve worked some figures out - and they’re pretty shocking…

• A full Jumbo Jet burns about 50 tonnes of fuel crossing the Atlantic; flying to Sydney from London burns about 250 tonnes of fuel.
• A jet burns fuel at roughly the rate of 17.5 litres for every kilometre travelled - most cars do roughly 10-11km/litre.
• My commute to work is 85miles/136km each way.My car (a GTI but pretty fuel-efficient) averages about 38mpg/62kmg.
• I drive to Heathrow and back roughly once a week - that’s roughly 8,500miles/13650km a year using about 225gallons/1000litres of fuel: which produces about 2 tonnes of CO2.
• I fly roughly twice a week (ie there and back), averaging 5000miles/8050km each way (ie about 10000miles/16100km a week). Assuming I fly 50 weeks a year I probably fly about 500,000miles/805,000kilometres a year
• Which means I’m participating in the burning of about 3 MILLION Gallons/14 MILLION Litres (or roughly 8500tonnes) of fuel PER YEAR which produces about 30,000 tonnes of CO2! (The average family’s transport apparently generates about six tonnes of greenhouse gas per annum, mostly due to car use.)

Even I was surprised to discover it’s that much…I feel like a one-man smog factory!

 

Now it’s all very well my proclaiming my “Big Year” plans - during which I will no doubt also bang on on this very blog about how development is changing the world and how species are threatened by the way humans are consuming the planet’s resources - without looking more closely at my own actions. So what can I do to placate my cynical friend and my own troubled conscience?

Apart from writing what will I’m anticipating will undoubtedly be an epoch-defining and educational book about my “Big Year” (available through all good blogs sometime in 2009, 2010, or perhaps 2011) I’m going to “carbon offset” my travels, and send the money to an organisation I’ve supported in the past called Treeflights which is based in Wales and is run by the excellent Ru Hartwell. Treeflights are currently covering a couple of Welsh hillsides with mixed, native woodland and their founding concept couldn’t be simpler: ‘You fly, We plant’. In other words, I’ll fly, they’ll offset for me.

 

 

Do what, Charlie? What exactly is this “carbon offsetting” thing? Put very simply (I’m not a scientist so “simply” is the only way I know to put it!), when we burn carbon-based fuels (like oil/gasoline) we produce emissions - many of which, like Carbon Dioxide (CO2) are “greenhouse gases” and contribute to global warming. What “offsetting” aims to do is calculate the emissions produced by the fuel burned and work out how much it would cost to absorb or “sequestrate” the emissions by actively removing Carbon from the atmosphere and storing it in plant materials through photosynthesis. (”Offsetting” this way has its opponents who say it doesn’t make any difference whatsoever, and that ‘global-warming’ is a green lobby scare-story anyway, but I believe what I believe and so far I’ve yet to find a better way to at least try to make amends for my lifestyle…)

There are many ways to offset carbon production, and numerous organisations offering their expertise to help individuals (even “bad” ones like me) be better people - but Treeflights is the one I like the best, and Ru is, judging by our online conversations, an extremely committed man who cares passionately about what he does! In essence then by supporting Treeflights I’m opting to calculate what it would cost financially to offset the amount of carbon I put into the atmosphere in 2008 in terms of planting trees.

How will I calculate these costs? There are now numerous “offset” conversion websites online, and a few quick calculations suggests the following:

• By making a 5000 mile plane journey my personal production of CO2 is estimated to be about 0.89tonnes. The cost to offset that single journey is calculated to be about 10GBP - and as already explained I make about 100 such flights a year!
• By commuting to work and back by car I produce about 13.89 tonnes of CO2/annum. The cost to offset that is about 150GBP/annum.
• So, if my roster next year is anything like it has been over the last few years my “personal” CO2 production in 2008 is likely to cost me about 1150GBP to offset!

Add in hiring the odd car and using the odd taxi downroute, and I could be liable for a bill somewhere in the region of 1250GBP - which is quite a lot of money really…but, hey, it’s also quite a lot of carbon I’m responsible for. And it should also mean that several hundred new trees will be planted over the course of the year, ready to soak up the fumes of every 747 I fly on until I eventually either retire or someone offers me a less environmentally-unfriendly job!

I’ll keep a table online so you can see how rigidly I’m sticking to this plan - and should I send some advance cash to Ru and he plants a few saplings on my behalf I’ll post a few photos too. Hopefully I’ll end the year more “carbon neutral” than I began it (if I don’t take into account lighting, heating, food production and a host of other things anyway!)

 

If you’d to learn a little more about Treeflights have a look at their very interesting website which is full of sensible comment on why planting trees to absorb carbon is a long-term strategy, why it’s not THE answer to global-warming but it’s a PART of the answer, and how trees are not only good for us but for huge numbers of other animals too…http://www.treeflights.com.

 

On an equally serious note, besides doing what I can to offset my contribution to global warming there is another good reason for me wanting to do this. As many of you will know, my best friend of the last 20 years, Peter Mowday, died of malignant melanoma a fortnight ago. Like me Peter was a fanatical birder and the site where Treeflights operates is home to a growing population of Buzzards and Red Kites, two favourite birds of both of us. I contacted Ru last week asking whether there was a possibility of holding a tree-planting ceremony in Peter’s memory, and the response was both positive and warm. So, in early 2009, a group of us will be travelling up to Wales to stick some trees bought with my offset money into the Welsh soil and thereby give Peter a place to come and stand with his binoculars whenever he fancies seeing the Kites from the shelter of his own grove of trees. Seems like a nice idea anyway…