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
@cdamian @ajsadauskas @green Did you miss the 3000 km part? Then there’s the strawberries that come from 3000 km in another direction.
Also, when I’m standing in the supermarket looking at the range of a dozen different milk brands, how do I know which one is sustainable? If they claim to be sustainable, how do I know it’s not just green washing?
I’m sorry but the nay-sayers commenting here have not convinced me. I think you just want me to be wrong.
@anne_twain @cdamian @ajsadauskas @green
This discounting of transport is absurd. The Swiss grid is hydro and nuclear. Transport is laughably short compared to the rest of the world. The biggest carbon input is natgas ro produce bound nitrogen, aka fertilizer. Storage, processing and refrigeration are grid bound.
Yet I read if you apply the MODELS they claim some Brazlian food can be more sustainable than local produced. (Discounting again the huge food waste problem!). Absurd.
