Carbon wake up call

Yikes.
I just did a carbon footprint test at www.slate.com. Here's the damage:

Your annual carbon emissions are 23,836 lbs.
That's equivalent to the emissions from 2.34 passenger cars.
Average carbon emissions per year, per person:
United States: 44,312
Qatar: 117,064
France: 13,668
India: 2,645
Kenya: 440

So I can congratulate myself on emitting just over half of the average American - but I know America and Americans, so I'm not that impressed with myself.

And what's terrifying is that I answered the "good" answers on most of the questions on this quiz. I don't use a dishwasher, wash all my clothes on cold, line dry everything (no clothes dryer), don't own a car, rarely take taxis, turn off lights like crazy, don't have air conditioning in the house, recycle everything, carry my own bags with me to the store, buy most of my food locally, compost about half my food waste... etc etc etc.

Wow - after writing the paragraph above I again realise how much living in the UK has changed me. Of that laundry list of "greenish" practices, I think that when living in America, I did... hm. I don't think I really did any of those things. I owned a car, loved air conditioning, never thought about bringing my own bags to the store, always drove to the store, and to work, and everywhere else, used the washer and dryer even though I had a backyard where I could have dried clothes...it's funny what the culture around you will do to you over time. And heartening for campaigners who try to bring awareness to issues like climate change. Over time, it can seep into the culture and change people's behaviour.

But back to my point - I do all of these greenish things and STILL I am a really crappy global citizen, in carbon terms. Kind of depressing - is it just the Western / Northern lifestyle that is unsustainable, no matter how "green" we go within that lifestyle? And I imagine having kids someday, and not having the luxury of time that I now have as a kid-free adult, and I have to admit that clothes dryer and having a car are going to start to look really attractive.

Maybe all of it's a moot point - corporate-level emissions dwarf mine to almost nothingness. A colleague told me yesterday he recently read about a guy who lived a "carbon neutral" lifestyle for a year - and then calculated that he had held off catastrophic climate change by about... 7 seconds.

There's not upbeat ending to this one, but it is a theme I think about a lot and hope to revisit. In the meantime, go take the test at www.slate.com and report back.