What is James Bond’s carbon footprint?

Not that Green, is Mr Bond.

By now many of you will have seen Quantum of Solace, the latest James Bond movie. While Bond may have been revitalised for the twenty-first century, his attitude towards recycling and the environment seem to have been neatly bypassed. In Quantum of Solace he disposes of a dead man in a skip (to be environmentally conscious he should have put him on a compost heap) and travels to no less than six exotic locations on a variety of knackered vehicles. While the ice caps are melting and polar bears are finding it increasingly difficult to get by, it’s about time that 007, famed for saving the world, took a look at his carbon footprint.

Carbon footprint - it’s all about your pollution level!

A carbon footprint refers to the impact a human and that person’s activities have on the environment. A carbon footprint is basically the overall quantity of carbon dioxide that can be attributed to a single person and their actions. These include the emissions caused by their energy use as well as other unexpected or unanticipated emissions for the span of one year. So what do you suppose 007’s carbon footprint might be?  The most obvious source of carbon dioxide is emission from travel, whether that is in a car, airplane or other public transportation. Let’s do the maths: one of Bond’s favourite shaggin’ wagons is the Aston Martin Vanquish, which can go from 0 - 62 mph in 4.8 secs and has a top speed somewhere around 200 mph. It’s difficult to gauge a road trip with Bond as we are subject during every movie to a variety of stylized jump cuts and montages, but let’s say on the average cross country sojourn through Europe he travels 750 km at 18 kmpg, which is what you can expect from the monstrous Vanquish. Bear in mind that’s the average for normal driving. Has anyone ever witnessed Bond out for a leisurely spin? Taking into account his DVLA-defying driving style – 007 would never be allowed to take Miss Daisy around the block – let’s say he gets about 15 kmpg. Over 750 km, that would be 50 gallons of petrol. That gives us 50 x 10.4, or 520 kg of carbon dioxide. Rumour has it that Al Gore cried himself to sleep after watching Casino Royale. We cannot even begin to guess what blowing up a helicopter, a fighter jet, one cargo plane and several boats may create in carbon dioxide, but it’s not a stretch to imagine it would be what scientists refer to as ‘a lot’.

Maths - mathematicians say it makes the world go round. Everyone else disagrees

How about flying? In just one incident of chasing bad guys, he leaves the United Kingdom and goes to Italy. The approximate distance from border to border is 2,147 km. So taking the flight on a commercial airliner of 2.2 km per kg of carbon dioxide, he is responsible for 976 kg of carbon dioxide for that one flight. Next he goes to Austria. That’s another 1,160 km, resulting in an additional 527 kg of carbon dioxide for that flight, again assuming he shared a commercial airline with other passengers. Bond then returned to Italy, adding another 527 kg to his running tally. His next stop was Haiti; from Italy that is approximately 7,911 km, so he added another 3,595 kg of carbon dioxide to the atmosphere. When Bond left Haiti, he goes to Russia, approximately 11,195 km, give or take – yet another 5,089 kg of carbon dioxide. The tally for flights would be a whopping 10,684 kg of carbon dioxide. Taking his driving into account, this leaves Bond with an estimated footprint of over 11,000 kg of carbon dioxide in just a few days, or in real world terms, about four icebergs. Being a conservative Brit, let’s cut that in half, leaving him with 6,000kg in a week’s work of traveling. Taking that over the course of the year, that’s a carbon footprint of 312,000kg. The average Brit has a footprint of around 10,000kg. In other words, with a conservative estimate, Bond’s carbon footprint is equivalent to that of 312 Brits, or the combined audience for the last Kula Shaker tour.

Not excatly a Prius, is it?

So what could Bond do to reduce his world-destroying carbon footprint, bearing in mind that his travel alone will put pay to most of the Arctic Circle? The first thing would be to go back to the Ford Mondeo from Casino Royale, a solid everyman car with good average mileage. True, he could stump for a Toyota Prius, but we want him to be alive at the end of his mission. Perhaps instead of traveling to these exotic locales he could load his MI6 instant messenger service and video chat with the bad guys, exercising his less than legendary diplomatic skills. Okay, it’s not practical, but then saving the environment never is. The truth is, Bond needs his size 10 carbon footprint, so it’s up to us to make sure we reduce ours. Besides, he’s the one busy making sure we have a world to save in the first place.

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