Right now, could you prepare a slice of toast with zero embodied carbon emissions?
Right now, could you prepare a slice of toast with zero embodied carbon emissions?
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
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@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 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 @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.
@urlyman @ajsadauskas @green Further, we’ve never faced a climate crisis before, and we may not get our act together, but we should and I hope we will. If we do, those actions will be unprecedented and rapid, and that will make many things possible that weren’t possible before.
@urlyman @ajsadauskas @green We talk about this more here: Koomey, Jonathan, Zachary Schmidt, Karl Hausker, and Dan Lashof. 2023. "Abandon the idea of an “optimal economic path” for climate policy." Invited Commentary for WIREs Climate Change. vol. e850, July 2. [http://doi.org/10.1002/wcc.850 ]
@jgkoomey @ajsadauskas @green Thank you for taking the time to point to further nuance and reading. I’ll endeavour to dive in.
Like you, I hope we buck our ideas up. Fast
@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 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 @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
@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