What is James Bond's environmental footprint?

I know this question appears to have been created with the sole purpose of enraging Jeremy Clarkson, but watching the glitz and the beautiful locations in Skyfall I wondered if all this excess is even vaguely quantifiable. I decided no, and just went after the carbon emissions as a proxy.


First of all they're in Istanbul. Lets say for arguments sake he traveled there from Heathrow, his one way flight (in business class naturally) generates .37 tons of CO₂.

It is never explained how Bond survives or finds his way to the sun drenched rustic paradise that shows English language news, but there he probably incurs the lowest footprint of his life. No air-con or heating, no car and most likely just locally produced food.

I can't remember if there are any clues as to his location here but let's say it's somewhere on the Turkish coast... for argument's sake. Same footprint on a flight back to London (running total .74).

Bit of driving around in London probably in something nice, as Q points out later Bond hasn't had much experience on the Tube, and then a flight to Shanghai incurring 2.31 tons of CO₂.

Some scrapping then a trip to a super awesome looking bar, some more scrapping and Komodo dragons. A bonk with a sexy lady. Then onto a boat, wind power, nice. But the crew are a bunch of minions and take Bond and his lady captive on a derelict island.

After some homoerotica from the creepy bad-guy played by Javier Bardem and a shooting competition gone horribly wrong, the helicopters come in. Can't remember how many but lets say six... for arguments sake. Also for the sake of argument lets say that these helicopters flew from the nearest land 40 miles away, incurring a CO₂ output of 2 tonnes for one chopper (this was a shamefully rough calculation).

Another flight back to the UK from Shanghai with the villain in custody 'hot towel Mr Silva?', 2.31 tons of CO_2.

After Silva uses a bit jiggery-pokery to hack MI6, and their whole security network, there's a chase through the London Underground. Silva wants to kill Judi Dench/M and after saving her Bond decides to use her as bait. So they use a nice old Aston Martin to drive to Scotland and do a bit of Home Alone style preparation. CO₂ for the drive 0.26 tonnes, if we say for argument's sake that he's gone from London to somewhere in the center of Scotland in an old, large engined car.

I also factored in Bond's day to day living as a contribution to his footprint. Some of the questions on the carbon calculator I used included:
Do you enjoy 'intensive activities' eg quadbiking, skydiving (well I don't know about enjoy but, yeah)
Do you eat red meat everyday (yeah, Bond's libido's not gonna fuel itself)
I regularly have to have the latest fashions (yes)
I have to have the latest technology (yes)
Everything I use gets composted (if you're talking about women and bad guys, yeah)
Bond's annual out put from just existing was around 14 tonnes.

Total footprint: 21.62 tonnes, to put this in perspective the global average carbon footprint per year is 1.3 tonnes (ref) and the UK average is 11.9 (ref).

Hammer to a glass argument

At the end of all this you may justifiably feel that there is so much in this post operating for the sake of my argument that without these 'facts' said argument might collapse under it's own retardedness.

To undermine this argument further, I found a Guardian article where a climate scientist points out that any one person reducing their carbon footprint, or even lots of people doing so, is not going to work.
Fossil fuels are just too useful as a source of energy, they are going to to be taken out of the ground and used by someone, so the proposed solution is to force the fuel extracting companies to sequester equivalent carbon to what they release.

What the film should really include is a scene where Bond helps MI6 plant some trees or re-flood a peat bog.

To give an idea of how little you matter in the scheme of things there's a website called Trillionth Tonne showing the global production of carbon.

Perhaps we need excess, even if it's vicariously through murder and destruction perpetrated by a suave spy. But I think that, just as with Jacky Gleason's threats to send his wife right to the moon via a punch, this stuff could - and probably should - start to look old fashioned at some point.

Thanks to Mike for the blog idea.