Right now, could you prepare a slice of toast with zero embodied carbon emissions?
Since at least the 2000s, big polluters have tried to frame carbon emissions as an issue to be solved through the purchasing choices of individual consumers.
Solving climate change, we’ve been told, is not a matter of public policy or infrastructure. Instead, it’s about convincing individual consumers to reduce their “carbon footprint” (a term coined by BP: https://amp.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2021/aug/23/big-oil-coined-carbon-footprints-to-blame-us-for-their-greed-keep-them-on-the-hook).
Yet, right now, millions of people couldn’t prepare a slice of toast without causing carbon emissions, even if they wanted to.
In many low-density single-use-zoned suburbs, the only realistic option for getting to the store to get a loaf of bread is to drive. The power coming out of the mains includes energy from coal or gas.
But.
Even if they invested in solar panels, and an inverter, and a battery system, and only used an electric toaster, and baked the loaf themselves in an electric oven, and walked/cycled/drove an EV to the store to get flour and yeast, there are still embodied carbon emissions in that loaf of bread.
Just think about the diesel powered trucks used to transport the grains and packaging to the flour factory, the energy used to power the milling equipment, and the diesel fuel used to transport that flour to the store.
Basically, unless you go completely off grid and grow your own organic wheat, your zero emissions toast just ain’t happening.
And that’s for the most basic of food products!
Unless we get the infrastructure in place to move to a 100% renewables and storage grid, and use it to power fully electric freight rail and zero emissions passenger transport, pretty much all of our decarbonisation efforts are non-starters.
This is fundamentally an infrastructure and public policy problem, not a problem of individual consumer choice.
#ClimateChange #urbanism #infrastructure #energy #grid #politics #power @green
@jgkoomey @urlyman @ajsadauskas @green
Relative decoupling doesn’t really matter. The fact that emissions rise at a pace slower than GDP is not good enough. We need emissions to start dropping, like yesterday.
AFAIK there is no evidence whatsoever of absolute decoupling happening globally, whether we’re talking about CO2 or material footprint (which has been accelerating, in fact).
Humans are a part of nature. The idea that we can decouple our economy from environmental impacts is absurd.
@jgkoomey @urlyman @ajsadauskas @green
New technologies can bring efficiency improvements, but can also bring new uses for resources, and that ultimately translates to more demand. Recent decades are the best proof of that. Even though everything is more efficient now, our material footprint and environmental degradation is at its peak as well.
@jackofalltrades @jgkoomey @urlyman @ajsadauskas @green
Even if absolute decoupling is possible, we can no longer view it as a reasonable strategy. If we started in the 60’s, sure, *maybe* we could have maintained a slow-growing economy while staying within Earth’s biophysical constraints.
But we didn’t.
We are now so far outside safe bounds (#overshoot) that the theoretical possibility of absolute decoupleing seems moot, at best. And perhaps a dangerous distraction.
https://www.stockholmresilience.org/research/planetary-boundaries.html
@FantasticalEconomics @jackofalltrades @jgkoomey @ajsadauskas @green from my reading, efficiencies have a very well-established pattern of feeding Jevons paradox.
And that’s what animals are evolved to do. They pursue energy sources subject to external pressures on them. We think we’re cleverer than that. The last 30 years, in particular, strongly suggest otherwise
