Why is carbon so important?

Ka pai! Let’s keep going with our climate change kōrero (chat). I’ve got some interesting facts about carbon to share.

You know how we’re made of all sorts of stuff? Well, carbon is one of them. It’s this awesome chemical element that’s in heaps of things around us.

Did you know, 18.5% of our bodies are carbon?

It’s not just in us, though. Those sparkly diamonds? Pure carbon. The graphite in your pencils? Yup, that’s carbon, too!

The problem is that humans burn loads of things that have carbon in them. Think about wood, coal, gas, oil, petrol, and diesel. We use these for power and to get around.

But when we burn these things, all that underground carbon gets released into the atmosphere where carbon combines with oxygen and becomes this gas called carbon dioxide, or CO₂ for short.

It’s called CO₂ because it’s one bit of carbon joined together with two bits of oxygen.