I dit it!

My life is now CO2 negative

Like most people, I care about the environment and the climate, and in 2018, I decided that my life should not contribute to higher CO2 levels and higher temperatures. And as of 2021, it doesn't!

In my opinion, it's like in a company: You can raise income or lower your costs to improve your budget. I can lower my CO2 emission or I can make sure that whatever CO2 emission I'm responsible for, is somehow absorbed by other means.

Some people tell me to stop eating meat, stop buying new clothes, don't spend so much time online, and definitely don't fly! But I'm not ready to give all of that up. I love travelling and I want to keep exploring the world. Instead, I've chosen to buy trees. According to a lot of studies, trees are very good at sucking up CO2 and turn it into oxygen.

So I'm planting trees. Or rather, I'm buying trees and I leave the dirty work to someone else. And I went kinda nerdy to make sure that I buy enough trees to help the planet.

During 40 years, one tree will absorb one ton of CO2. Of course, this is on average - some trees live longer, some don't. So how many trees do I need to buy? And how long will it take, before my life turns CO2 negative? I need a spreadsheet to figure that out - and you can see it further down this page.

I used this website to find out how much CO2 emission I'm responsible for in the country I'm living in. Again, this is average, and I might be responsible for more or less. Since I don't own a car, I assume that I'm not above average. But I travel a lot, so I had to take that into consideration. Luckily, I register all my flights on Flightradar24 and the site calculates the CO2 emissions on those flights. I don't know how they do that or if it's accurate, but I've decided to trust them.

All these numbers go into the spreadsheet and I do a bit of calculation. First, let me show you a chart with the yearly emission and absorbtion. You'll see that my life is pretty boring until 2008 where I start flying and my total CO2 emission more than triples. But in 2018, 'my' trees kick in and the green line shows that absorption is now higher than emission:

But this is just year-by-year. I have to accumulate emissions and absorptions over my entire life. Then it looks like this:

I'm quite proud of this. In just three years, I managed to buy enough trees to make my entire life CO2 negative. Price: 10,000 USD! It's not cheap and I'm not saying everyone should do this. I could have stopped at 1,246 USD and my life would still be CO2 negative when I die. I just wanted it to happen as fast as possible.

These charts, and the spreadsheet further down, update automatically as I buy more trees. Because I will still buy trees, although it won't be several thousand trees every year. I will also keep updating my emissions, if I fly more or less than expected.

I buy the trees from One Tree Planted and they're one US dollar each. And yes, there is an unknown there - I don't know how long it takes for them to plant the trees. This is not taken into account in my calculations. It's not perfect, but I can only do so much...

If you shop on Amazon, you can support One Tree Planted by using this link and selecting them as your charitable organization.

My CO2 budget - emission and absorption in tons:

Personal emissions budget

Thanks for reading. If you went this far and still don't know who I am, I'm impressed! Head over to my Facebook page and take a look at me - but don't expect too much :)

If you have any comments or questions, you can email me a trees@diginicki.dk

Credit for the header image goes to Valiphotos.