One Tonne Life

The average person in the UK directly produces 6 tonnes of CO2. If we're ever going to get climate change under control, then we need to reduce this to 3 tonnes per person.

Can it be done?

Well, if you remember back to early January I posted my emissions figures for 2010, revealing that I was responsible for 2.41 tonnes of CO2. Actually, I was responsible for more than that - I didn't include any figures for food consumption as that's impossible to calculate with much accuracy at the moment.

A few Swedish companies have got together to see if they can reduce the emissions of an average family, in a project called One Tonne Life.

Here's the trailer:

The problem with this project, though, is that they've taken the family out of their normal everyday environment and put them into a highly efficient house which is powered with renewable energy systems, and also given them an electric car.

While it'll be interesting to follow the "experiment" over the course of the next year (via YouTube and their website), we'll only really tackle climate change when we reduce the emissions of the ordinary joe on the street who either isn't willing or isn't able to make drastic changes to their lifestyle.

I'm always a bit sceptical of the "change your lightbulbs" "eco-lifestyle" approach to reducing emissions. We need bigger changes than that, and changes that sometimes the population as a whole will have no idea are being made for them - replacing fossil-fuel power stations for example.

That's why we need to be pushing governments and businesses around the world to actually do something, something big and something beneficial, instead of merely handing out a few lightbulbs and hoping that Mrs MacGlumphy actually uses them.