A few years ago, I was going round a supermarket with a journalist who was researching an article on the carbon cost of food. We trailed up and down the aisles with the Dictaphone running, and she plied me with questions: "What about these bananas? How about the cheese? That's organic, so it must be better, right? Is the lettuce harmless? Should we have come here by bus?"
Despite working as an environmental consultant, I was pitifully unable to answer most of her questions. And it struck me that this was part of a wider problem. Almost everything we do has a carbon footprint of some kind, but how do we know what it is? Should we avoid leaving our television sets on standby, or boycott plastic bags, or stop flying, or all of the above? It's no good starting with a list of 500 different rules, because most of us wouldn't be able to keep them for more than a day – especially when we discover that many well-intentioned actions, such as driving to the bottle bank may do more harm than good.
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