A two tonne lifestyle for the win

I read this article and found it so interesting I had to repost it. We need to reduce our greenhouse gases emissions and fast. That's an amazing initiative and an example we should all follow.

For the past eight years, I have been trying to live a two tonne lifestyle. That’s two tonnes of greenhouse gases from the things I own or buy – basically everything that I spend money on. I did this because I wanted to do something positive to fight climate change, and I felt that the place to start was with the things I can at least control. So I looked at the things I spent my money on.

During this time, I discovered something strange: a two tonne lifestyle has made my quality of life much, much better. I have saved a load of cash. I eat less meat, and have a lot more exercise built into my daily life. I still have a car, a nice warm house in winter, foreign holidays, and all the stuff I could ever need (a bit more than I need, actually, but I’m working on that). The reduced costs have helped me free up my time, so I can work less to ‘pay the bills’ and do more of the things I love.
But if there are personal benefits, what does a two tonne lifestyle do for climate change, or global warming, or whatever you want to call it? Let me try to explain why I think two tonnes is important, and break the numbers down a bit….

Numbers

So the human race currently puts about 50 gigatonnes of greenhouse gases a year into the atmosphere (1). (That’s 50,000,000,000 tonnes. Whoa! That’s a lot of zeros.) There are 7.3 billion people alive right now on the planet (7,300,000,000) (2). So that’s about 7 tonnes of greenhouse gas per person on average – with about 70% of that coming from gas, oil, or coal in one way or another.
At this rate, in the next six years we will probably go past the point of being able to save many low lying countries and cities. We will also lose many more species of animal, a significant amount of agricultural land, and most of our coral reefs. (3) That is a pretty depressing scenario, and there are plenty more impacts, but I don’t want to dwell on all that. So, moving swiftly on to…

The results

Critically, a two tonne lifestyle buys us time – til around 2030 – to limit the impacts of a warming planet. It buys us time to massively increase clean energy sources and energy efficiency, as well as improve farming practices and a host of other things that we know we can do. All of this gives us a really good chance of avoiding the worst impacts, that we all know are coming to get us in a ‘business as usual’ world. So the hope is here. What is more, as I mentioned at the start of this post, there are immediate benefits. A two tonne lifestyle is not only achievable, it is also desirable, as it has the potential to increase our wealth, free up more time for fun, and make us healthier.

The catch

I’m sure you’ve already spotted it. As an individual, you will probably benefit personally from living a two tonne lifestyle (if you aren’t already). But if it is going to prevent climate change from getting any worse, everyone needs to be doing it. That’s tricky, alright. But things are moving quickly on that front. More governments, businesses and people realise that we need to do something, and do it quick.
It’s also worth pointing out that there are maybe two billion people on the planet who are already living a two tonne lifestyle. Most of these people lack the privilege of finance and technology that I have, because they live in developing countries. They will be the first to bear the brunt of the changes to our weather systems, even though they are least responsible for it. If, like me, you have the benefit of technology, education, healthcare, and finances to tackle this problem head on, then lets use all our resources to solve this problem, clean up our act, and keep the human race moving forward. If you’re already doing it, let’s keep it going. Let’s step it up some more, all of us. For the win.

Sources
(1) SPM3, http://www.ipcc.ch/pdf/assessment-report/ar5/wg3/ipcc_wg3_ar5_summary-for-policymakers.pdf
(2) http://www.worldometers.info/world-population/
(3) http://www.carbonbrief.org/blog/2014/11/six-years-worth-of-current-emissions-would-blow-the-carbon-budget-for-1-point-5-degrees/ based on IPCC predictions published in 2014, but currently made unavailable online.

Article from:
https://www.livelight.org.uk/climate-change-personal-action-can-beat-it/