Download and print-out these pdfs: Low Carbon Diet monthly planner | Your carbon weight calculator

TRANSPORT

The commute

If you work within 2km (slightly less than 1¼ miles) of your home, try getting up earlier and walking or cycling to the office.

Before you know it, you’ll be able to cancel that expensive gym membership. If you have a longer commute, take the bus, Underground or train.

Use the following table to work out your weekly carbon calorie savings if you switch from driving to alternative modes of transport. Multiply the CO figure for travel by train, bus or Underground by the number of kilometres travelled each month. Then calculate your savings by deducting this figure from the total you would have incurred if you had driven.

Car emissions during rush hour, by the way, are much higher than the daily average — 339g/km rather than 180g/km for an average-size petrol car — so you’ll be shedding significant calories by taking the bus instead.

The carbon commute — CO^² emissions*

By diesel train — 98g for 1km

By Underground — 65g for 1km

By single-decker bus — 66g for 1km

By foot/bicycle — 0g for 1km

* emissions during peak commuting hours

If you’re not sure how long your journey is and you live in London, visit www.walkit.com which will work out the distance for you. Outside the capital, use the AA’s handy web-site at www.theaa.com/travelwatch/planner_ main.jsp to get distances between destinations nationwide.

Keep up your resolve by recording your monthly savings on the diet masterplan (see timesonline.co.uk/carbondiet). Here are some sample savings if you leave your car in the garage:

C = carbon savings per year

C For a daily 12km round-trip commute: train = 51kg, bus = 57kg; Tube = 58kg

C For a 4km round-trip walk to work: 24kg

C For a 12km daily round trip by bicycle: 71kg

The school run

Easy one this. At 8.50am almost one car in five in Britain’s towns and cities is on a school run, creating a giant mushroom cloud of carbon dioxide.

If your children’s school is 2km away or less, use your legs or bike. Research indicates that more active children are likely to become more active, healthier adults.

So get up 20 minutes earlier, prepare the kids’ lunch the night before and do whatever it takes to get out of the door with enough time before school starts.

If ditching the car every day is too daunting, try a two or three-day-a-week commitment. This way you have a get-out if it rains. Sample savings:

C 26kg a month for a 4km round trip, twice a day (if you cycle/walk to school three days out of five)

Other short hops

To the local shops, the library, friends’ homes, your health club. If you find walking dull, make it interesting. Put on headphones and an iPod. If you’re carrying things, take a backpack or use a bike with a pannier. Sample savings:

C 11.5kg for 20 short trips a month out of rush hour (64km total travel)

Want to know more?

www.transport2000.org.ukwww.eta.co.uk

Top 5 carbon-light petrol cars

Toyota Prius — 104g/km

Honda Civic Hybrid — 109g/km

Citroën C — 109g/km

Toyota Aygo — 109g/km

Peugot 107 — 109g/km

FOOD

Food production, processing, packaging and transport account for at least 20 per cent of British greenhouse gas emissions and a sixth of the carbon emissions produced by a typical household.

What action can you take? The answers are not all simple or obvious. Organic food is not always a good option, especially when delivered by aircraft. Food miles are bad, but long-distance delicacies do not generate the most food-related emissions. That dubious prize goes to animal rearing, which means that eating meat is bad for a low-carbon diet. Other culprits include food processing, refrigeration and supermarket storage. To keep it simple, we suggest you follow these five food rules.

1 Buy local and in season

The closer to home your food originates, the smaller its impact on the atmosphere and the more carbon calories you shed. Good choices, because they’re usually British grown, are carrots, parsnips, turnips, potatoes, cabbage, sprouts, broccoli, apples and pears. A majority of supermarket chicken, pork, beef and lamb is also home-grown, but always check the country of origin. By buying British instead of foreign produce, you can save almost 54kg/CO² on the contents of a single shopping basket. For example:

Basket made in Britain: cauliflower, mushrooms, Brussels sprouts, broccoli, carrots, onions. Total = 0.18kg CO² .

Basket flown from abroad: limes from Brazil, pears from Italy, avocados from Chile, peaches from the US, pineapple from Costa Rica, baby corn from Kenya. Total = 54kg CO² .

2 Eat less meat

This could be the single biggest difference that your eating habits can make to your carbon diet. Rearing animals and processing and refrigerating meat products uses much more energy than growing crops, fruit and vegetables. Livestock releases vast quantities of methane. Cows are the worst offenders. Each 1lb (0.45kg) of reared beef on your dinner table has cost 5.2kg of CO² to produce.

C 2.6kg for every beef meal you cut out.

3 Eat all the food you buy

Over a year we throw out a fifth of the fresh produce we buy — £424 worth — according to the Food Climate Research Network. If we ate all that, imagine the effect. Demand, domestic production and imports would all fall and so would national food-related CO² emissions.

So do your bit. Plan your shopping carefully, meal by meal, don’t buy more perishables than you can eat in a week and pay close attention to those use-by dates.

4 Buy UK organic food

Unlike buying local food, organic food is already a national habit. However British demand far outstrips supply, which means that most organic products are imported. The transport involved almost always produces more CO² emissions than those saved through organic production — 235 times more in the case of organic produce flown from New Zealand. Even transporting fruit or vegetables from Southern Europe generates twice the energy saved during organic production. Buy organic products made in Britain.

5 Buy in bulk

We each drive an average 130 miles a year just to buy food. The simple solution is to buy in bulk. Nonperishables — cereals, rice, pasta, etc — are cheaper to buy in bulk and as a bonus you’ll cut down on packaging waste. Home delivery is another option, with the supermarket doing the work and saving food miles by delivering to several customers in one trip.

C Do one weekly supermarket shop instead of three — 4kg a month, 52kg a year.

HOLIDAY

It’s impossible to ignore the impact on climate of cheap flights. With opportunities for global travel never greater, carbon emissions from international flights by Britons rose by 85 per cent between 1990 and 2002. Domestic air travel (often cheaper than the train) reached six billion passenger-miles in 2002.

No surprise, then, that air travel makes up a third of the average Briton’s direct carbon emissions. To make matters worse, the climate impact of flying is proportionally greater than that of any other personal activity. This is because carbon dioxide emissions have a greater warming effect when they mix with other greenhouse gases in the upper atmosphere. Just one return trip to Los Angeles will pile 5,216 kg/CO² on to your figure, 50 per cent of the average Briton’s annual emissions.

We’re not going to play Scrooge and tell you to give up your hard-earned holidays. But we will show you how to cut down those air miles and find more climate-friendly destinations. Cut your air miles Almost half of all flights over Europe cover less than 300 miles (483km). While jumping on a plane may have become second nature, this is a distance easily covered by train. And the carbon benefits are huge. Flights from London to Paris or Brussels generate ten times more carbon dioxide emissions than taking the train, according to independent research for Eurostar.

Carbon savings to holiday hotspots

Trips from London by train/bus instead of plane: Paris

C 222kg Prague

C 756kg Edinburgh C 232kg

Make a fly-less pledge

As a basic rule of thumb, the fewer flights you take the better. Start with a realistic commitment, perhaps cutting long-haul flights to one every two years instead of one a year. Or limit yourself to two budget-airline trips a year to European cities if you normally take three or four. You could always substitute a planned week abroad for two long weekends exploring Britain by train or car. If you love to shop in New York, why not cut out the jet lag and security checks, save lots of cash and carbon calories and order online?

C Cut out one return short-haul flight a year — 405kg;

Cut out a return flight to the US East Coast — 3,317kg;

Cut out a return flight to the US West Coast — 5,216kg.

Pay guilt money: offset your air miles

Carbon offsetting may sound technical, but it’s hitting the high street as concerned consumers seek to “cancel out” their impact on climate change. Most schemes work by paying towards energy-saving projects in developing countries, such as installing wind turbines or rooftop solar panels. Travel offsetting, especially by air, is generating the most business.

Offsetting is a feel-good move rather than a real weight-reducer, like substituting saccharine for sugar rather than cutting out sweet foods. But it’s better than doing nothing: we suggest that you consider these options, but don’t deduct any payments from your own carbon-calorie total.

Book with the Travelcare high street chain and offset your flights when you buy tickets. Eight price bands reflect the distance travelled — £3 to mainland Spain, £50 to Australia. Customers receive feel-good luggage tags that help to spread the word.

Next time you fly by British Airways look at their carbon-offset scheme at www.ba.com/ offsetyouremissions. A return flight to Johannesburg will set you back £13.30.

Climate Care, one of the most established offset companies, is a partner with Travelcare and BA and also takes individual donations at www.climatecare.org.uk. Read about its overseas projects and get payment estimates for your travel plans over the next month or year.

To work out your personal saving to any destination, you need to do one quick calculation. For every 1km that you travel, simply count 0.31kg/CO² saved if you take the coach and .37kg CO² saved if you take the train.

FOUR GOLDEN RULES OF CARBON DIETING

1 Save energy and money

The biggest diet-buster is home energy use. Heat, hot water and electricity account for 43 per cent of the average family’s direct carbon emissions — more than any other activity. But much of this energy is wasted, by millions of tonnes of CO2 a year. There is plenty of room to trim the fat, simply by cutting out careless habits and investing in a few home improvements. The key is to get into a mindset where it becomes second nature to save energy rather than squander it. After all, how hard is it to switch off a light? Here’s an added incentive: using less energy can also save you money. For example: £7 a year for each low-energy light bulb installed; £37 for switching off appliances on standby; £20 for draught-proofing windows and doors; £180 for insulating your attic.

2 Drive smart, fly less

Why do you drive? To get to work despite the traffic jams, parking costs and road rage? To drive the kids half a mile to school, when you could all do with the exercise? To visit the local gym (duh!) or corner shop? Transport is the fastest growing source of British greenhouse gas emissions. Before grabbing your keys, think whether you really need the car this time. We all love cheap flights. But flying creates more personal carbon calories than any other single activity. Following our diet, then spending a long weekend in New York, is like losing a stone and then stuffing yourself with doughnuts and putting it all back on. We’re not asking you to give up flying altogether. But finding other ways to travel, most of the time, is a cornerstone of a low-carbon diet.

3 Buy local

Buying products that have been flown thousands of miles to stock our supermarkets and high street chains piles on our carbon weight. And if enough of us make an effort to buy local or British-made products, retailers will get the message that consumers don’t want to shop at the planet’s expense. So become a consumer detective and scrutinise labels for country of origin. Any products you buy, try and choose home-grown or homemade.

4 Slash the trash

Half a tonne of rubbish passes through the average British dustbin every year. Most is buried in tips where the food waste decomposes and pumps out greenhouse gases. By throwing so much stuff away, we also create demand for new products, the manufacture, packaging and transport of which generate more greenhouse gases. Carbon dieters can turn this equation on its head by composting food waste, avoiding overpackaged goods and reusing or recycling their possessions.

The Low Carbon Diet (Short Books), published on May 3, is available at £11.69 (RRP £12.99) from Times BooksFirst on 0870 1608080 or visit timesonline.co.uk/booksfirst

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