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
The best lie from the fossil fuel industry is putting the burden of responsibility on the individual, and not the corporations.
The idea of a “carbon footprint” was created by the fossil fuel industry to convince people and governing bodies that individual people are the problem (and solution), and to distract from the pollution caused by industries.There is so much completely unnecessary waste in industries that individuals couldn’t possibly compete with. Most people aren’t even aware of how much is wasted before the products even reach them.
The best way to fight climate change is to hold companies accountable.
@18107 @ajsadauskas Gaslighting, literally
How can we hold companies accountable?
@jackofalltrades @18107 @ajsadauskas
By voting for the parties who don’t take any donations from corporations.
By voting for candidates who don’t rely on wealth accumulated from investing in those big corporations.
By understanding what greenwashing is, not falling into a trap of culture wars, and recognising that majority of people have more in common with poor people than with the super rich.
By understanding that the super rich trade their humanity for cash, every time.
@18107 @ajsadauskas so the 100 million barrels of oil supplied, purchased by consumers and burned into the atmosphere every day has no effect on the climate. That’s good to know. I mistakenly thought my gas boiler, my petrol car and all the plastic I was putting into recycling was harming the planet. Phew. I’m off to fill up my tank.
@benchwhistler @18107 @ajsadauskas https://yourlogicalfallacyis.com/strawman
“This is fundamentally an infrastructure and public policy problem, not a problem of individual consumer choice.”
The infrastructure is the millions of barrels of oil and the policies & systems in place to maintain its distribution for profit. You may or may not be able to switch out your boiler or use your car less. Many people won’t have any other option without huge systemic changes. Making it about individual choices won’t fix it.
@wav3ydave @benchwhistler @18107 @ajsadauskas
“Many people won’t have any other option without huge systemic changes.”
Yes. And at the same time many people *have* the option and are picking the wrong one.
It’s quite simple really, look at it this way:
Who is responsible for more emissions: the rich or the poor?
Who has more freedom to choose different options in life: the rich or the poor?
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@wav3ydave @largess @ajsadauskas @green I don’t think it has to be a personal choice vs collective action dichotomy, we need a three pronged approach: 1) persuade those who can make better choices to make them 2) fight for a more equitable society so everyone has access to less damaging choices 3) make the better choices the easier, cheaper or default
Why not both?
Individuals need to change their expectations and consumption patterns, while the policy and infrastructure need to change in tandem.
You are not going to get radical reforms from the government without popular support from the population. That requires sacrifices and changes in societal norms.
In your toast example, the option that is available to everyone right now is to _not_ make the toast.
Just eat the damn bread.
You don’t need a toast.
@jackofalltrades @ajsadauskas @green
The zero emissions option, unfortunately, is to not eat. Whether it’s bread or toast.
@scottmatter @jackofalltrades @ajsadauskas @green
Your diet could be a MASSIVE net negative if all you ate was billionaires. 😅
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Also, on the topic of carbon footprint: https://mas.to/@jackofalltrades/111051876005552645
Yes, the problem is reheating the bread, not everything it took to make the bread you glossed over that OP listed. It’s the toasting the bread that makes it so bad
@JungleJim Yes.
It’s not a problem that people eat bread. Growing wheat and making bread is not a problem.
Producing a toaster is a wasteful use of resources that further adds to a growing mountain of e-waste.
Toasting the bread is a wasteful use of energy.
So is driving a car to get a loaf of bread, because one lives in a food desert.
There are both individual and structural reasons for the situation we are in. Shifting the blame and focusing on just one aspect is counterproductive IMO.
You know can toast bread with any source of dry heat though? You don’t need a toaster. Use a solar oven if you like, or a camp fire, or wait for lightning to hit a tree, or a lava flow, or a regular stove.
Growing all that wheat takes acres of native prairie and turns it into a tilled monoculture devoid of soil life, turning a carbon sink into a net increase in atmospheric carbon. The bread is the issue; Grow cassava and beat it into a paste, then dry that in the sun. There’s your bread. Don’t make it hot twice though, toast is bad.
@ajsadauskas @green I buy foods that have been produced as close as possible to my home. It’s insane to buy milk from Queensland (3000 km away) when we have dairies here in Sth Australia.
Buying local often means buying what’s in season locally and doing without for the rest of the year. This is also the cheapest way to buy fresh food.
While you’re right that governments have the most power to make change, individuals can signal our willingness to make change without waiting for government.
@anne_twain
It’s complex though. Transport is usually a tiny fraction of the CO2 emissions of growing food.
Most of the time a sustainable business further away will be better than buying local.
@ajsadauskas @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.
@ajsadauskas @green is it not worse than that?
There is more or less a 1:1 correlation between energy use and GDP.
We don’t have the time to build out the scale of renewable infrastructure that would replace our current energy use.
We need to use much less energy which means much smaller and therefore radically different economies
@urlyman @ajsadauskas @green Absolutely. I put it this way: we probably have enough in the way of consumer goods to last us the next 10 years. So let’s stop buying new stuff - clothes, furnishings, tech gadgetry, hobby supplies, sports gear etc - for 10 years, while we wait for new technologies to get established and new infrastructure to be built. (Is 10 years enough to develop cargo-carrying airships?)
To manage the lack of employment, put the whole population on Universal Basic Income and limit working hours to 20 per week (with some obvious exceptions).
To enable repair of goods, outlaw practices like voiding warranties if repairs are made by someone other than the manufacturer. Provide incentives for people to set up small local repair businesses.
@urlyman @ajsadauskas @green Most applications [not toasting bread, though] you need about 1/3 as much renewable as fossil, because final vs primary energy. So there’s that.
@nebulousmenace @urlyman @ajsadauskas @green Saul Griffith has been really great at explaining this issue. We don’t need to replace fossil primary energy completely, because so much of it is just waste from combustion losses that simply go away when you switch to non combustion electricity generation like renewables. Saul Griffith. 2021. Electrify: An optimist’s playbook for our clean energy future. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press. https://amzn.to/31naqTU
@jgkoomey @nebulousmenace @ajsadauskas @green thanks for the recommendation Jonathan. I’ll explore that. I’m aware of the point you make about not needing to replace fossil energy completely.
I defer to your scholarship. From my much more limited awareness it sure looks like the scarce commodity is time. There’s what is possible in principle and what’s possible within the less-than-a-decade of Paris budget we have left
@nebulousmenace @ajsadauskas @green I agree that for consumer end-use, renewable* power is waaay preferable to fossil-fuelled equivalents. But that’s just part of the problem.
We absolutely need them at scale to buy us time though.
*renewables are more properly thought of as re-buildables
@urlyman @ajsadauskas @green There is not a one to one correlation between energy and GDP, and there hasn’t been such a relationship for decades. Richard F. Hirsh & Jonathan G. Koomey. 2015. Electricity Consumption and Economic Growth: A New Relationship with Significant Consequences?. The Electricity Journal 28: 72-84. doi: http://dx.doi.org/10.1016/j.tej.2015.10.002. http://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S1040619015002067
@jgkoomey @ajsadauskas @green As with your other reply, I defer to your scholarship and understanding but unfortunately I don’t have an Elsevier subscription.
I’m aware of many scholars whose analysis suggests really significant decoupling is at best extremely doubtful. I guess we’ll know in years to come who was right.
From my layperson’s perspective the immovable constraint would appear once again to be time…
@jgkoomey @ajsadauskas @green e.g. in this much shared tweet from last year, Ireland is the decoupling poster child but its rate of consumption-based emissions reduction over the 14 years was around 3.6% per year and 2 of those years were the global financial crisis.
It sure looks like decoupling is running at a rate decades too late so maybe we should be pulling other levers?
@urlyman @jgkoomey @ajsadauskas @green
Unfortunately Ireland’s economic statistics are a bit misleading. It’s not all actual stuff happening in Ireland, but some big corporates having EU or EMEA HQs in Ireland. Possibly Microsoft, PayPal, Apple etc.@urlyman @ajsadauskas @green It’s important to distinguish “relative decoupling” from “absolute decoupling”. To state that there’s a 1 to 1 relationship between GDP and primary energy use is a statement about relative decoupling, and the evidence disproving such a statement is very strong. Here’s a graph from our 2015 article updated to 2019 (working on an update through 2022 now).
@jgkoomey @urlyman @ajsadauskas @green
GDP is a garbage metric. It encourages destruction and externalization.
@urlyman @ajsadauskas @green What the graph shows is that there was rough constancy in energy/GDP for the US from 1949 through about 1970, then the ratio of PE to GDP dropped substantially almost continuously for the next almost five decades.
@urlyman @ajsadauskas @green There are people who are skeptical about ABSOLUTE decoupling, which means they think relative decoupling will not be enough to meet climate goals or even to reduce absolute energy consumption. I personally think there’s no reason why absolute decoupling isn’t possible, but those arguing for this point of view point to history and find very few examples of it.
@urlyman @ajsadauskas @green My own view is that just because it’s never happened before doesn’t mean it couldn’t happen. Also, as we shift from combustion based electricity generation (which has 50-60% combustion losses) to renewables we will simply eliminate half of the primary energy associated with fossil electricity generation, which will substantially accelerate the reduction in PE/GDP. The Roser tweet also gives more data, so it’s worth looking more.
@ajsadauskas @green So, let’s talk about what it would take to get the farming, processing, and transport of foods and other goods, along with the energy used in a home to come from renewables.
In that way, the Carbon Footprint isn’t such a bad way to think about it, the same tool intended to make individuals feel responsible can open our eyes to the kinds of change needed far beyond our individual reach.
Do we need to modernize and electrify domestic goods transit? I think it’s probably a good idea (and honestly, I think self-driving long-haul electric freight is a great idea, along with a high speed electric freight and passenger rail network).
Do we need existing fossil fuel power generator sites to host energy storage facilities? (That’s where most of the transmission wires traverse, much better than asking people to install batteries in their basements)?
Do we need a ‘space race’ style government & private push to design and build electrified farm equipment and smart irrigation systems, which we can ultimately tie to the Farm Bill to switch our food producers over to electrified farming?
This is what they do: convince everyone everything is a matter of personal choice.
Tobacco: framed as personal choice
Transportation: personal choice
Climate response: choice
Public health / masking: choice-ifiedWho does that serve? The wealthy and powerful, because a population that learns it can work together to solve problems and find solutions that make life better will eventually figure out that together we can solve the problem of *them*
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@ajsadauskas @green this really illustrates the size of the challenge.
@ajsadauskas @green just a pinch of conspiracy here…
