Each one of us is responsible for adding around ten tonnes of CO2 to the atmosphere every year, though our American and Australian cousins produce at least twice as much.

It will be higher for you, the reader, as averaging out the emissions allocates ten tonnes to everyone, including babies and toddlers.

Though we might be aware that about one-third comes from transport, another third from housing, with the rest from our wider activities and what we buy, we don’t really see our ordinary everyday lives in terms of CO2.

Helpfully, researchers are now working out the carbon cost of many items we take for granted, and they add up. Thus a daily newspaper, recycled, produces 500 grams of CO2, a paper towel ten grams, half that of an electric hand-dryer using coal-fired electricity, and each of the e-mails we launch is responsible for four grams. We know that driving small cars produces less CO2 than big ones, often close to or below 100 grams per kilometre, but we may not be aware that while making a Citroen C1 releases six tonnes of CO2, the figure for a Land Rover Discovery is 35 tonnes, the equivalent of almost 200,000 miles driven in the C1.

We can now find out even more when we go shopping as supermarkets, such as Tesco, are working with the Carbon Trust to put CO2 details on their own products.

It’s still early days, so there’s only just over 100 at the moment with the big black carbon footprint symbol, and they are struggling to get the information on other brands.

I had to look very carefully in the Great Horton Tesco and was disappointed that the symbol was missing on the potatoes, nappies, bottled water, kitchen foil and cut flowers, all which would have shown hefty figures, like the 900 grams on the milk. It was the same with the cheapest toilet and kitchen rolls, although the luxury ones showed two and nine grams per sheet respectively, and the laundry liquid was 650 grams for a 30 degree wash, 160 grams less than at 40 degrees. The lightbulbs also passed the test, with only 12 kilograms for 1,000 hours of a 20-watt bulb. In general, the weight of the CO2 produced is normally heavier than the product – such as toilet paper at just over one gram per sheet. It follows that the packed shopping bags we struggle with are our regular CO2 contribution to climate change. With 500 grams of CO2 from a can of beer and 36 kilograms from a kilo of beef, it would be helpful if we were all teetotal vegetarians.