Aweh, Dear Ruminants and Groupies,
Forgive me, Ruminants, it has been four weeks since my last blog. The flesh has been weak, and I have been spending the time increasing my carbon footprint for 2026.
Individual carbon footprint (noun): A number calculated to make you feel personally responsible, and perhaps slightly guilty, for climate change while you wait for a delayed long-haul flight to a conference on how industry might one day decarbonise.
Pick Your Category
Let’s sort humanity into five groups: those of us who know the number and feel mildly guilty; those who know and couldn’t care less; those too busy making a living to think about it; those who have never heard of it; and those who seem determined to set a personal best.
I fit comfortably into the first category.
My cars spend a fair amount of time sitting at home looking expensive. My flights are less discreet. Two return trips to Cape Town and one Johannesburg–Doha–Athens return trip account for about 3 tons of CO₂e, roughly 30% of my estimated footprint for 2026.
An impressively large share for a few weeks spent doing not very much.
Flying is the great carbon sin of the affluent middle class.
A Rainforest in the Desert
Doha’s Hamad International Airport is magnificent, although “airport” seems too modest a word for a place with enough luxury boutiques to meet all the needs of South Africa’s ruling class.
It also has a 6,000-square-metre indoor tropical garden, complete with enormous trees. Keeping that vast glass-and-steel monument pleasantly cool in the Qatari desert must require an air-conditioning system with a carbon footprint worthy of a small country.
Qatar Airways connects it to more than 160 destinations. The airport handled 54 million passengers and nearly 283,000 aircraft movements in 2025, about 775 take-offs and landings a day.
Standing among the trees, I admired the engineering while contemplating the carbon footprint of flying millions of people to a desert so they can walk through a rainforest on their way somewhere else.
Later, queuing to board at two in the morning in a crowded terminal, I looked up at a giant screen listing flights to every corner of the globe. It put my own insignificance, and my meagre carbon footprint, into perspective.
Meet Mr Big
Some time on the Greek islands brought me face to face with people determined to set a personal best.
An evening walk along the harbour in Sifnos is an excellent way to admire the yachts and be reminded how poor you are.
Let us give one hypothetical owner, Mr Big, a 43-metre Pershing 140: a floating mansion capable of nearly 40 knots. A couple of months’ cruising could burn enough diesel to produce around 300 tons of CO₂.
Add a private jet for getting to and from the yacht, and wherever else he fancies, plus several staffed mansions that presumably remain comfortable whether or not anyone is home, and somewhere around 500 tons a year seems a plausible, gloriously imprecise guess.
My own roughly 10 tons suddenly look less like a carbon footprint and more like a carbon toeprint.
The Ladder
Before I become too smug about Mr Big’s 500 tons, I should compare my 10 tons with someone living in a South African informal settlement.
If you have no car, rarely fly, buy little beyond what you need and use little electricity, your personal footprint might be one or two tons a year, perhaps less.
I could congratulate myself for consuming a fiftieth of what Mr Big does. The shack dweller could make exactly the same point about me, with rather more justification.
Carbon arithmetic is wonderfully good at identifying the excesses of the person above you on the ladder.
Four Years
The IPCC’s arithmetic is fairly brutal. In pathways that limit warming to 1.5°C, global greenhouse-gas emissions fall 43% below their 2019 level by 2030, then keep falling sharply.
We have four years.
And what are we doing?
Building renewables, certainly, but also burning enough fossil fuel to set another emissions record in 2025. We hold climate summits, announce targets, congratulate ourselves on the wording and return to the airport.
I can hardly sneer from outside the terminal. My own flights account for about a third of my annual footprint.
As far as the 1.5°C global warming target is concerned, we’re fucked.
We have measured the cliff, calculated our speed and published a beautifully illustrated report on the brakes.
Then we pressed the accelerator and ordered more leather upholstery.
Blame Someone Richer
Who is to blame?
Mr Big, obviously.
His yacht burns more diesel getting to the next island than I use in a year, and his private jet is presumably circling overhead in case he fancies lunch in Paris.
I could spend a satisfying afternoon blaming him, were it not for the awkward fact that my own flights alone produced more carbon than many South Africans will produce all year.
Still, Mr Big is much worse, so let us return to blaming him.
It is easier than asking whether the person at the bottom of this ridiculous ladder, looking up at both of us, might regard our argument over which of us is the problem as somewhat beside the point.
See the World, Damage the World
So here I am, approaching retirement with enough time and money to see more of the world, fully aware that seeing it requires helping to damage our future.
I can condemn Mr Big, confess my own hypocrisy and spare a thought for the shack dweller who contributed almost nothing to the mess and will have the least protection from it.
None of that will stop me planning my next trip.
I will check the fares, choose a seat and perhaps feel guilty somewhere over the Indian Ocean.
The atmosphere will register the carbon; it will not register the guilt.
So, fellow Ruminants, what penance do you prescribe for my sins, three Hail Marys, a carbon offset and economy class for eternity?
Until next time
Bruce
