I think that this is a very important debate, because there’s only so far you can go with legislation. What goes on behind closed doors is impossible to police. And equally, if you start charging people to do the right thing, it has a differential impact on those on low incomes and people with lots of money can simply ignore it. People without a car can’t take unwanted furniture to the recycling centre; they rely on the council or a charity to collect if for them. Personal carbon budgets would encourage people with cars to make short journeys on foot, rather than always getting into the car.

It would also prompt us to think about the carbon footprint of what we eat, and this is an area that we don’t often talk about. Some organisations such as the Food and Agriculture Organization of the United Nations—they calculated that a fifth of all man-made emissions are from meat, dairy and egg farming, and other organisations calculate that that figure is nearer to half of all emissions, so this is clearly a subject that we need to shine a much brighter light on. But I think we can agree that the food we eat has a major impact on our carbon footprint, and any personal carbon account would need to take that into account. It’s slightly more complicated than clocking up how much energy we’re using in heating your home.

But it’s interesting to note that—. Greenhouse gas emissions produced by the combined growing, rearing, farming, processing, transporting, storing, cooking and disposing of the food on our plate is something we need to look at holistically. If we buy green beans from Kenya, clearly it has a much higher carbon footprint than if we grow it locally. The carbon footprint of just 1 kg of lamb is 39.2 kg of carbon dioxide in emissions, which is apparently equivalent to driving 91 miles in a car. In comparison with that, fruit is only 1.1 kg of carbon dioxide, equivalent to driving 2.5 miles. Milk is slightly more, but 1.9 kg of carbon dioxide, equivalent to a 4 mile drive in a car. So, meat and cheese have the highest carbon footprint. Fruit, vegetables, beans and nuts have much lower carbon footprints.

The Co-op has done some research on their farms and they’ve identified that 54 per cent of carbon emissions on their farms is from methane and nitrous oxide emissions from their livestock. The methane is much more potent than carbon dioxide. So, they’ve done a six-year monitoring of their farmers to show that methane is 28 times as potent as carbon, and nitrous oxide is 260 times more potent. All these are big figures, but one of the things it highlights is that it’s really important that people don’t put food waste in with their residual waste, because then it goes into landfill and then, of course, it causes methane.

I know that it is heretical to even consider this, but if we moved away from a meat-based diet, you’d have a really significant impact on our personal carbon footprint. Five different diets compared showed that eating chicken instead of beef cut a quarter of food carbon emissions in one simple step. I’m not advocating that we never eat the wonderful Welsh lamb, but I am saying that we need to think carefully about how often we eat it and whether we eat it as our regular food. I think these are really important issues that we need to bear in mind.

Switching the foods you eat doesn’t just improve your health. It also is going to improve your personal carbon footprint. I think these are some of the things we need to consider carefully in understanding how we would do it in reality. Even knowing how much carbon it takes to produce any particular grocery item is a really important thing and perhaps it should be on the labels. Thank you very much.