A climate essay

Your seven tonnes

Who is heating the planet? ended on a number: the average Briton is responsible for about 7.1 tonnes of CO₂ a year once imports are counted. Averages are where arguments go to hide. This page builds your number instead, one decision at a time, and then shows you where it lands on the world scale.

Factors from the UK Government's 2025 greenhouse gas conversion tables, Poore & Nemecek (2018) & lifecycle estimates via ICCT; scale from Who is heating the planet?

scroll ↓

The scale

An empty scale, marked in tonnes of CO₂e per year. By the bottom of this page it will hold your footprint. Answer honestly; nobody is watching, and the link this page makes at the end is yours to share or not.

Before you woke up

Your bar does not start at zero. Roads, hospitals, schools, the army, the construction and shipping baked into everything around you: about 2.2 tonnes a year, before a single personal choice. That grey block alone outweighs the entire footprint of the average person in the world's poorest half. No lifestyle switches it off; only politics does.

Getting around

Now the levers. How do you get around, and how many miles a week do you cover by car, across every car you use?

The car itself

The tailpipe is only part of the car. Building one emits roughly 7 tonnes for petrol, closer to 10 for an EV and its battery. Spread over a fifteen-year life, that is a real slice of every year. Was your car bought new?

New EV, old banger

The comparison beside your bar: a brand-new EV against keeping the old petrol car, both at your mileage. At high mileage the EV wins quickly; at low mileage the greenest car can be the one that already exists.

Flying

Round trips per year, short-haul (Europe) and long-haul (another continent). One transatlantic round trip is about 1.6 tonnes, the same as the annual saving from going fully plant-based, twice over.

At home

A typical UK home burns about 11,500 kWh of gas and 2,700 kWh of electricity a year, shared between the people living in it. How is yours heated, and how many share it?

Eating

Food is the lever people underrate the most. From a meat-heavy diet (about 2.5 tonnes a year) to vegan (about 1), with every stop in between.

The scale, again

Here is where your bar lands. The markers are the same ones Who is heating the planet? ended with: the world's poorest half average 1.6 tonnes; the middle 40% about 6.6; the UK, 7.1.

The budget

And the dashed line is the uncomfortable one: roughly 2 tonnes per person per year by 2050 for a fair shot at the Paris targets. Notice that the grey baseline alone overshoots it. Personal maths runs out exactly there, which is where Your summer in 2050 and Your hand on the dial pick up.

Your number

Your total appears here once you have set the levers.

What to do with one number

Cut the biggest slice, not the loudest one. For most people that is driving, flying or heating, in that order of tractability; the bin is not on the chart.
The baseline is a ballot, not a bill. A third of your footprint is shared infrastructure. It fell 48% since 1990 because the grid changed, and it will only keep falling the same way.
Averages hide the answer. If your bar sits under the UK marker, the argument "people like me are the problem" is doing someone else's accounting for them. Who is heating the planet? shows whose.

Seven tonnes is not a verdict. It is an itemised receipt, and receipts are the one kind of document you can argue with line by line.