Our planet Earth is warming. Glaciers are melting, rivers are drying, and forests are disappearing. You have probably heard about the famous “carbon footprints” at school, at work, at home, on the bus, or in the media, but maybe you do not understand what it means. Carbon footprints have been defined as “the total sets of greenhouse gas emissions produced by an organization, event, product, or individual.” The purpose of this idea is to help measure and reduce the amount of carbon dioxide and other greenhouse gasses produced in our every-day life. However, some people insist that this idea is nonsense, since carbon is essential to life. I don’t agree with them, because anything in excess is harmful.

According to Kristie Pelletier’s video Carbon Footprint: Perverts Importance of CO2, the idea of a carbon footprint is just political nonsense, because great part of our planet and lives is made up of this gas. She insists, “carbon dioxide being a pollutant is stupid and it should be a blessing.” She also refers to the carbon cycle, in which we exchange CO2 and oxygen with plants. I agree that this is a completely natural process, so it would be ridiculous to ban it. However, she is totally not getting the point, because as I said previously, everything in excess is harmful. She isn’t seeing the concept correctly and she keeps contradicting herself. According to her video, “all life on Earth is carbon based.” Isn’t that quite enough carbon? She can’t understand that what scientists call carbon footprints, are the pollutants that aren’t naturally produced and that humans produce in excess. When we don’t share rides, burn wastes, and smoke, we are sending a lot of carbon dioxide into our atmosphere and ozone layer that overload the process of the greenhouse effect. It’s just like watering a plant. You need to pour just enough water, because if you pour too much, it will die.

Besides, Pelletier is ignoring the fact that there are more greenhouse gases apart from carbon dioxide that are involved in the concept of carbon footprints. Just by using your air conditioner, you are producing chlorofluorocarbons.

Something that also disturbed me from the video was the fact that Pelletier first said that the atmospheric pressure was ten times higher in the past than nowadays, but then she said that global food production had an increase of 12%, because of the increase in carbon dioxide. Completely contradictory in my opinion.

Next time you are going to discuss this concept, make sure you really know what it is about. It is not about banning what is naturally produced, but reducing what humans excessively produce. Remember that carbon isn’t the only greenhouse gas that is overloading our atmosphere, and that anything in excess is harmful.