Keep Carbon in the Ground


Don't laugh or even exhale -- you CO2 excreter -- this is serious

Working for the Power Down: "Working for the Power Down
by Robert Newman for the Guardian Green Guide, August 2006
It’s one thing to live a low-impact personal life, but quite another to do so at work. Most people’s biggest carbon emissions come when they are at work, but these are the hardest to cap because here we have less power.
So in my personal life it’s fairly simple. I never fly short-haul (i.e. within Europe), don’t own a car, only buy stuff second-hand - except underwear, get my electricty through Good Energy, try never to use supermarkets but only local shops, I am a meat-eater but try only to eat grass-fed, my website has a solar-powered web-host, and through ceaseless carping I have converted a dozen very close, but ecologically irresponsible friends into no friends at all.
But it is not so straightforward in the world of work.
It was my intention to make the world's first ever carbon-neutral television programme when I recorded ‘Robert Newman’s History Of Oil’ for More4 last year. ‘Will there be travelogue?’ the executive producer had asked me.
'No,' I said, 'Apart from all the carbon emissions, what's the point of sending me halfway round the world to stand outside an oil-refinery in Houston just to deliver two paragraphs to camera? Why not fax the script to the Mexican guy who sells burgers outside the refinery gates and have him read out the script while his mate holds a camcorder?’
And that's pretty much what we did. The plan was to have a global network of carbon-neutral correspondents or 'camcordistas'. And they didn’t even have to own or know someone who owned a camcorder. There’s a website where you can click on CCTV cameras by street corners and parking lots from Detriot to Dh"