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How I avoided 200 kgs of CO2 emissions in ten days

On Friday, July 4th, 2008 | in Tags: Climate change, Personal, transport

Two weeks ago I took some vacations and visited my family near Nancy. Additionally, I went to the renewable energies fair in Paris. It was also the opportunity for me to have a most interesting meeting.

All this brought me to travel up to 1,600 kilometers (approx. 1,000 miles). By choosing the train instead of my Toyota Yaris, I avoided the emissions of up to 208 kilograms of carbon dioxide.

With this travel, I am reaching a total reduction of 800 kilograms of CO2 this year. I plan to reach a minimum of a thousand five hundred kilograms in 2008.

If you have been reading this blog since the beginning of the year, you may know that I already used this transportation meaning to decrease my carbon footprint in an important way.

I calculated that I had avoided this far 600 kilograms of carbon dioxide emissions since the beginning of the year. Indeed, I accounted up to 300 kilograms in January and February alone.

This then, I must have taken the train to the amount of reducing my carbon dioxide emissions of 300 kilograms as I did various trips. All this thus makes 800 kilogrames less on my carbon footprint for this year so far.

I wrote these lines in the Train à grande vitesse between Nancy and Paris. In an hour and a half I travelled 352 kilometers, in perfect conditions. This makes an average speed of 235 kilometers per hour. (147 miles per hour)

This shows how personal climate change mitigation can be achieved if one gives him or herself the means to do it. Alternatives to energy intensive solutions exist and can be used.

Transportation is one of the main greenhouse gases emissions contributor of our economies.

We now have to choose to use low emissions transportation means. Marguerite, once again, provides us with interesting data on that matter. In her article The curse of air travel, she proposes us an interesting graph :

As you can see, trains with non fossil electricity (88 percent of the French electricity is low carbon) emit much less than cars or worse trains.

I hope you enjoyed this post as it enables you to see that each and everyone of use can make a difference in the fight against global warming.

Some related articles from this website :

• Keeping on decreasing CO2 emissions by using the train
• How I easily avoided 76 kg of CO2 emissions
• WWF wants more plug-in cars
• Why dividing by four our CO2 emissions can be done
• Videoconferencing, a simple solution to climate change