I wear size 8 shoes. It turns out my carbon footprint is also 8. Every year, I am responsible for the equivalent of 8 tons of carbon dioxide* entering our atmosphere. These molecules absorb infrared light from the sun and begin to vibrate - they get hotter. My footprint would have been less than 5 if I hadn't taken a trip back to Australia last year (them jet airliners burn through a lot of fuel!). But my vegetarian diet and lack of a car work in my favor - the average American has a footprint more than double mine. Most other countries are less polluting, with your average Chinese and European denizen having a footprint comparable to that of moi. Among the worst offenders is Australia :( My nation lives off coal exports, resulting in a whopping 28 tons of carbon dioxide per Aussie!
After finishing grad school three and a half years ago, I decided to holiday my way through Western Europe (yup, that's 3 tons of carbon dioxide right there!). Well, it wasn't strictly a holiday - I was there to attend the Lindau Meeting of Nobel Laureates in Germany. Picture hundreds of chemistry grad students from around the world hanging out with a couple dozen Chemistry Laureates. It was all rather exciting, perhaps the highlight for me being the lectures by Professors Molina, Crutzen and Rowland. These guys discovered how certain chemicals destroy the ozone layer (the Earth's "sunscreen"). As if global warming wasn't bad enough, now we had a second problem on our hands - instead of being absorbed or reflected, the harmful UV rays from the sun were getting all the way to our Earth :(
Last year, I once again had the pleasure of meeting a Nobel Laureate, a certain Prof. Solomon who was visiting UIUC to deliver a lecture. Ms Solomon was part of the Intergovernmental Panel for Climate Change, a body which had been awarded the Nobel Peace Prize. I was lucky enough to have been allocated a one hour meeting with her, during which we could discuss research. Needless to say, I diligently put a presentation together highlighting all my plans for converting carbon dioxide into useful chemicals. Transforming a pollutant into a valuable material is like killing two birds with one stone and I was excited to disclose my plans to her. It was late afternoon and we met in my office, went through my work and chatted about climate change and what not. That lasted all of ten minutes. She told me about her adventures to Antarctica to collect ice core samples to quantify the carbon dioxide trapped inside, thereby tracking CO2 levels over the course of many years. She said I should visit the South Pole sometime. I responded by telling her yours truly was cold enough in Illinois and that traveling to Antarctica would be lunacy. She then changed topic by asking me about my story, about which we talked for over an hour. Indeed, the tale of a woman traveling from Hong Kong to Europe, meeting a Swiss man and settling down in Australia appeared much more interesting to her than my research proposal. Fair enough, talking exclusively about chemistry can be a little much sometimes.
While I enjoyed the meeting immensely, the one thought that had stuck with me afterwards was a negative one. She had told me that ordinary people can't really change their carbon footprint much. This had deflated me a little - she was saying that your average peep can't make a difference to our environment. While I understand that individuals can do little to affect how products are manufactured and the way in which energy is processed (although in some countries one can pay extra to have part of one's power bill come from renewables), I beg to differ. However small, our actions have important consequences for the future of our planet and our kids and grandkids. Every little bit counts, so: do take the stairs, do buy those locally grown vegetables, do ride your bike. And next time someone says you can't make a difference - don't believe them for a second :)
When the time comes for me to leave this Earth I hope that I will have done as much as I can to enrich the lives of others. Conversely, I want to have done as little as possible to disturb the environment that we all share. Professors Molina, Crutzen and Rowland, elder statesmen in the chemistry world, had got me fascinated in atmospheric science, an area very unrelated to my research. It's fair to say the next generation of scientists has big shoes to fill. But they also have smaller footprints to make.
*For those interested in chemistry: other anthropogenic greenhouse gases are included in this figure. For example, my existence might also result in nitrous oxide and methane production. Owing to their high absorptivities, these are far worse than carbon dioxide (laughing gas is no laughing matter, if you'll excuse the bad joke). Their contributions are included in the "carbon dioxide equivalents" and are scaled accordingly.
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