Interesting Facts

According to a report by by Caroline Saunders, Andrew Barber and Greg Taylor, lamb produced in New Zealand and shipped to Britain has a smaller carbon footprint than lamb produced locally in the UK. (To be exact, farmers in Britain use four times as much carbon per tonne of New Zealand lamb than farmers in New Zealander. How can shipping meat half way round the world create fewer "food miles" than locally rearing it? Well when you want to understand the real cost to the environment it's not enough to calculate "food miles" you have to look at other factors, and when it comes to raising lamb the UK uses more nitrogen fertiliser for pasture land by a factor of more than 13. I'm not sure who financed the study, for all I know it was the NZ meat marketing board, but maybe they have a point.) Information source

According to research by climate consultants ICF International and anti-virus firm McAfee, email spam uses more than 33bn kilowatt-hours of energy every year. (This is enough to power more than 2.4m homes, and amounts to emissions of more than 17 million tons of CO2. Not just that, but searching for legitimate e-mails and deleting spam uses 80% of the energy, so of the 131kg of CO2 created by the average business user 22% of it is related to spam. According to the same report spam filtering would reduce unwanted spam by 75%, the equivalent to taking 2.3 million cars off the road. I've never heard of wanted spam.)

According to US physicist Alex Wissner-Gross, a typical Google search on a desktop computer produces about 7g CO2. (This means that two search requests on the internet produces "as much carbon dioxide as boiling a kettle". Google says that a a typical search produced only 0.2g of carbon dioxide. I want to know what a typical search is!)

According to traffic researcher Frank Schmid, there are 160,000 traffic jams in Germany every year. (This means that 288 million litres of petrol are wasted and 714,000 tons of C02 created. I'm afraid that on my last two holidays I was a contributer, for some reason every time I drive a long way in Germany, someone decides to demolish a bridge on the motorway I'm on.)

BBC South East has revealed that airlines deliberately fly longer routes over the Atlantic Ocean to avoid paying air traffic control charges. (These routes are known as tango routes, and they can produce an extra three tonnes of carbon dioxide.)

56 countries account for 90 percent of global carbon dioxide emissions (A new report shows that Sweden is doing the best job in tackling carbon emissions, Germany second best, the UK was seventh, whilst the US ranked second worst only topped by Saudi Arabia who were deemed the most irresponsible emitters among the world's major economies.

14% of Rolls-Royce owners also own a private jet and 7% a yacht. (In addition, on average, Rolls-Royce owners already have an average of seven or eight cars, along with three to five properties. So, do you fancy working out the carbon footprint for these people?)