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Opinion | I’m selling my car to shrink my carbon footprint and do my bit against climate change
- Flights were the biggest chunk of my carbon footprint but aviation accounts for less than 2 per cent of global emissions
- I could eat less meat and rely on the city’s efforts for cleaner energy but with driving accounting for a third of my footprint, the choice was obvious
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I bought a car a few months ago and I’m about to sell it. Why, you may ask. Obviously, there are the ludicrously high petrol prices and parking fees. But I’ve also come to realise that driving is terrible for the Earth – I just didn’t realise how bad until recently.
The summer heat was unbearable at the landfill where I worked. Tuesday, September 13, was the hottest day logged for the month since records began in 1884. The mercury hit 35.9 degrees Celsius at the Observatory’s headquarters. The previous record was … in the previous week!
“Climate change is getting out of hand,” I thought. Defeated, I sat down and searched on my phone for a carbon footprint tracker as sweat dripped onto the screen. I was horrified to discover that driving accounted for a third of my carbon footprint.
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In Hong Kong, road transport contributed 19.7 per cent of carbon emissions in 2020, similar to the global scale. There are almost 1 million registered vehicles in the city, and 70 per cent of those are private cars.
The government could do more to limit the number of vehicles on the road. Fuel prices are already among the highest in the world, thanks to fuel tax. However, as Mike Rowse wrote back in 2019, we could learn from Singapore’s car permit system.
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According to the carbon footprint tracker, my other main sources of emissions were household electricity, meat consumption and flights.
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