A reason to save CO2

[groar]

Hi,

As several people know, I'm lucky enough to eco-drive and change things at home to generate less CO2, saving money is just the good side. I know since a long time that 1 liter of diesel generates 2.66kg of CO2 (for gasoline it's 24.4) and 1 kWh of electricity produces (in France) 60g of CO2 (to be added to 10mg of radioactive wastes...).

But what I discovered this week-end is how much CO2 are absorbed by one tree : 10 kg/year and this is for younger forests, in older forests trees are growing less and so are needing less CO2 : 7kg/year

With our cars, my wife and I are driving 15000 kms each at 5l/100. We are burning 1500 liters of diesel by years and so we are generating 4 tons of CO2 by year. To absorb such a quantity of CO2 we need 400 trees, ie 0.5 hectare

Of course we do not own so many trees... only half a dozen

For the electricity we are consuming 12000 kWh/year, so it's 720 kg of CO2 which corresponds to 72 trees which is roughly 0.1 hectare.

I grew up in the Foret des Landes, one of the biggest forest in Europe : 1 million hectare. We are 60 millions in France and there isn't 30 millions hectare of forest in France.

Suddenly any thing I'm doing wasting CO2 is making me a little bit more guilty

Denis.