Your Carbon Footprint is a 23-chapter, fully-referenced guide to measuring and reducing your environmental impact — built on peer-reviewed emission factors, not vibes. 58 data tables. Five real case studies. A 30-day plan. Ten languages.
The Paris Agreement implies a personal budget of roughly 2 tonnes of CO₂e per year — about 5.48 kg a day. Here is how that compares to where most people actually are.
It is the difference between difficulty and catastrophe for billions of people. Most books leave warming as an abstraction. This one gives an entire chapter to what each fraction of a degree actually does — to crops, coastlines, water, and the temperature at which outdoor work becomes medically dangerous.
| Impact domain | At +1.5 °C |
|---|
Scenario figures are drawn from IPCC assessment reports and the peer-reviewed impact literature, as compiled in Chapter 2B.
“Behind each fraction of a degree lies a cascade of specific, human-scale consequences: the frequency with which a farmer in Maharashtra loses her crop to drought, the height of floodwater in a Bangkok apartment building, the temperature at which outdoor labor becomes medically dangerous in Phoenix.”
Every emission factor in the book traces to a published source. Two of the 58 tables, reproduced here in full.
Grams of CO₂e per passenger-kilometre
Sources: EEA, IPCC, manufacturer LCA reports. Aviation includes a ~2× radiative forcing multiplier for contrails, water vapour and NOₓ at altitude.
Grams of protein delivered per kg CO₂e — higher is better
Primary source: Poore & Nemecek (2018), global averages from peer-reviewed lifecycle assessments.
Most climate books stop at the problem. This one starts there and keeps going — into your plate, your commute, your thermostat, your wardrobe, and then into a plan you can follow.
How scientists actually calculate emissions, what an emission factor is, how to build a personal baseline — and why most online calculators mislead.
A complete food emissions guide covering 19 seafood types, fermented foods, seasonal produce and protein efficiency — plus a practical roadmap for changing what you eat.
Twelve transport modes compared per kilometre, real EV models with real grid intensities, manufacturing footprints, and where rail genuinely beats flying.
Heating sources ranked by CO₂e per kWh, heat pump versus gas boiler over 15 years, grid intensity by country, insulation, solar and storage.
Embodied carbon in phones, laptops, appliances, furniture and clothing — and what the circular economy actually saves, material by material.
A personal carbon budget, a 30-day detox, a year-by-year trajectory — then the chapter on where individual action stops and systemic change takes over.
The specific phrase "carbon footprint," referring to greenhouse gas emissions, gained widespread currency in the early 2000s — and its popularization is entangled with a controversial chapter in corporate history. The oil company BP ran a major advertising campaign between 2004 and 2006 that introduced a "carbon footprint calculator" to the public and encouraged individuals to calculate and reduce their personal emissions. The campaign was criticized by climate activists who argued it shifted responsibility from the fossil fuel industry onto individuals, making consumers feel personally culpable for problems caused by structural forces far beyond any one person's control.
Here is one way to think about it: if you stacked 55 billion tonnes of CO₂ in solid blocks, each the size of a shipping container, the stack would stretch from Earth to the Moon and back — many times over. Every year. Without pause. That is what our global economy emits, continuing a trend that has accelerated almost without interruption since the first coal-fired steam engine began turning wheels in eighteenth-century Britain.
At the personal level, food is typically the single largest or second largest contributor to an individual's carbon footprint, depending on how much they fly. For someone who does not travel by air frequently, food is almost certainly the number one lever. And unlike home heating or transport infrastructure — which often require significant capital investment or depend on unavailable alternatives — diet is something most people in wealthy nations have the ability to change right now, today, with little cost and potentially significant co-benefits for health and wellbeing.
Individual action is necessary but not sufficient. The carbon budget numbers make this mathematically clear: even if every person in the developed world adopted the most aggressive individual lifestyle changes available — vegan diet, no flying, electric car, heat pump, maximum insulation — the resulting emission reductions would be significant but would still fall short of the 1.5 °C target without concurrent system-level change.
The 80/20 rule applies to carbon. A small number of changes delivers 50–60% of the achievable reduction — and several of them save money rather than costing it.
| Action | Annual saving | Difficulty | Cost |
|---|
Five people, five countries, five completely different highest-impact actions. The book walks each through a multi-year trajectory with real numbers.
A large SUV, a big suburban house and a meat-heavy diet. Year one is diet and tariff; the capital investments — EV, solar, heat pump — come later. A 59% cut, still not at target, but profound.
No car, mostly vegetarian, flat-share — the "environmentally friendly" life. Four international flights a year swamp all of it. His case proves the highest-impact action is rarely the obvious one.
No public transit, an old petrol Golf, a gas-heated village house. German BAFA grants and KfW loans make the heat pump the decisive move — capital, not willpower.
Twelve domestic and four international flights a year, all work. He cannot unilaterally stop. His chapter is about employer-level change, not personal virtue.
Already low, thanks to the MRT and no car. Her air conditioning is not a luxury but a climate necessity — a reminder that identical behaviour carries different costs in different places.
Chapter 4 builds your own baseline; Chapter 17 turns it into a year-by-year budget; Chapter 18 gets you started in 30 days.
The book is an act of translation, not invention. These are the datasets underneath it — all of them public, all of them checkable.
Kilograms of CO₂e per kilogram of food, as global averages from peer-reviewed lifecycle assessments across thousands of farms.
Grams of CO₂e per passenger-kilometre. Aviation figures include the radiative forcing multiplier of roughly 2× for contrails, water vapour and NOₓ at altitude.
Grams of CO₂e per kilowatt-hour of useful heat or electricity delivered, with national grid intensities given country by country.
Lifecycle embodied carbon from raw material extraction through manufacturing and assembly, for phones, laptops, appliances and furniture.
Annual CO₂e per capita on a consumption basis — imports and exports allocated to the country of consumption, not production.
CO₂e conversion on a common warming scale: methane at 25×, nitrous oxide at 298× over 100 years — which is why beef scores so high without burning fossil fuel directly.
Each edition is a complete translation — not a summary — as a Kindle eBook and a paperback. English and French are available now; the remaining eight are on their way.
A software developer, entrepreneur, and advocate for accessible climate science. He is the creator of Decarbonr, an iOS app that helps thousands of people track and reduce their daily greenhouse gas emissions through a data-driven interface.
His interest in carbon accounting grew from a conviction that the complexity of climate science was keeping most people from engaging meaningfully with the problem. Decarbonr was born from that conviction: peer-reviewed emissions data in the hands of anyone with a smartphone, no environmental science degree required. This book is the next step — the context, the science, the specific numbers, and the practical steps, in one volume.
Twenty-three chapters, fifty-eight data tables, and a plan that starts tomorrow morning.