As well as trying to reduce our energy consumption, we also want to reduce our carbon footprint.

Strange as it may sound, our carbon footprint in the UK is better than it should be, due to us already having switched to a renewable electricity supplier.

My rough calculations, using an online calculator , suggest that currently our household Carbon Footprint is 391Kg of CO2 per month, or 106 Kg of Carbon - or 4692Kg of CO2 per year. That is really quite scary. If we hadn't already moved to green energy provider, it would have been a mind blowing 6771 Kg of CO2 per year for our household.

NEF say that a personal consumption of less than 3000Kg of CO2 per year is good by UK standards; our personal one is 2346Kg of CO2 per year; technically Nigel is slightly better than me, as he uses a bus rather than a car for work. Nigel is actually at around 2077Kg of CO2 per year, and me 2620Kg of CO2.

The average UK person has a carbon dioxide footprint of between 7 and 15 tonnes. In Sweden it is around 3 -7 tonnes. 

Really reducing this is actually going to a lot harder than reducing the energy footprint, because of approximately a third of of energy consumption was already renewable, making reducing the carbon footprint a lot lot more difficult, as effectively we've already sliced a third off a typical household footprint. Also by moving to Sweden, we're effectively slashing our carbon output, anyway, because according to NEF, for the standard electricity companies it is currently 49% from renewable sources, and will rise to 60% as the nuclear stations are phased out, and according to Energy Bulletin it's half the electricity from renewables, and half from nuclear power.

Just by moving country, our carbon output drops to significantly with no real effort on our part. With no carbon from electricity or gas (no gas!), the main source for us will be the car.

Reducing that, or neutralising it, will be very difficult. With my new office being about 45 miles away from home, rather than the current 12, my personal consumption will increase significantly. Personally, I will be responsible for somewhere around 3 600 Kg of CO2 per year. As a household, though, that is still a reduction.