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 @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
Do any of these decoupling claims hold when looking at the global economic system as a whole?
While these statistics claim that they account for trade it is a very theoretical number. Would the emissions be the same if Ireland had to produce everything it imports locally? Just imagine that. Of course they would be much higher.
@urlyman @jgkoomey @ajsadauskas @green
The uncomfortable truth is that national accounting like that can make western countries feel good about themselves, but all it does is put colonial relations on display.
The two sobering graphs worth looking at are humanity's material footprint: https://unstats.un.org/sdgs/report/2019/goal-12/ and global emissions: https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/total-ghg-emissions?tab=chart&stackMode=relative&time=2000..2021&country=~OWID_WRL
All lines go up.
@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
@jgkoomey @urlyman @FantasticalEconomics @ajsadauskas @green
Let's make sure we're on the same page here. What we're interested in is for the emissions to start dropping. What #decoupling suggests is that this can be achieved with the economy still growing.
Achieving dropping emissions via relative decoupling could be done by the pace of efficiency improvements continuously outpacing economic growth.
1/5
@jgkoomey @urlyman @FantasticalEconomics @ajsadauskas @green
Note that for any given efficiency improvement to have the desired effect of reducing emissions it not only must be invented, but it also must be distributed across the world, again at a pace greater than overall economic growth.
2/5
@jgkoomey @urlyman @FantasticalEconomics @ajsadauskas @green
As an example, global meat production doubled in the last 30 years. If a new method of factory farming is invented that cuts methane emissions by 10%, for it to actually reduce emissions it would need to be adopted on every farm in the world in less than 3 years.
After which point we'd need another such invention to keep pace with the economic growth.
3/5
@jgkoomey @urlyman @FantasticalEconomics @ajsadauskas @green
It's also worth noting that currently all nations follow a recipe for development through industrialization based on fossil fuels. There is not a single country on a "green" path. That means fossil inertia in the system is very high.
On top of that, all our "green" technologies currently require input of fossil fuels in their prodution processes. That includes #solar panels, #wind turbines, hydroelectric dams, EVs, etc.
4/5
@jgkoomey @urlyman @FantasticalEconomics @ajsadauskas @green
Absolute decoupling would mean that all sectors of the economy that grow would be fully decarbonized, i.e. growth in the economy would not result in any additional emissions.
Given how our economy looks today (as explained above) and how little time our civilization has left (because of both effects of #ClimateChange and resource depletion) it seems quite implausible that absolute decoupling is a viable way forward.
5/5
@jgkoomey
what do you think it would take to achieve a global absolute decoupling?
I think we'd need a global renewable manufacturing industry that could produce/distribute/install renewables faster than the rate of energy consumption increase -- and that this industry would, itself, need to be powered by renewables.
Is that the sort of thing you have in mind?
@jackofalltrades @urlyman @FantasticalEconomics @ajsadauskas @green
@jgkoomey @urlyman @FantasticalEconomics @ajsadauskas @green
In other words, absolute decoupling is a statement of faith that requires ignoring all examples from history in a belief that humanity will invent a replicator from Star Trek.
@jackofalltrades @jgkoomey @FantasticalEconomics @ajsadauskas @green I’ve stayed relatively quiet on Jonathan’s push back because, frankly, I don’t share his optimism, but that doesn’t mean I’m a doomer: we should fight like hell for conserving as much biosphere as we can.
What we are up against is of a scale none of us can make robust sense of. Our different dispositions and attachments mean we each seize upon different territories of plausible probability…
@jackofalltrades @jgkoomey @FantasticalEconomics @ajsadauskas @green …If we can make a jump to being serious at scale we’ll know soon which of those territories we are actually in. And if we can’t it’ll mostly be moot
@urlyman @jgkoomey @FantasticalEconomics @ajsadauskas @green
We agree then: we should fight for the conservation of the biosphere, and that should be our focus. Preserving GDP growth is what's killing us, and it should be abandoned as a goal.
In my view it's already clear what path we're on. Having hope for a "green growth" future requires, as Jonathan said, ignoring history.
@jackofalltrades @jgkoomey @FantasticalEconomics @ajsadauskas @green I’m in the same place as you Jack. I’m just trying to acknowledge that we’re talking about turning round an unimaginably huge super tanker and we haven’t even got our hands on the controls yet.
As Mike Berners-Lee has said “If aliens were observing us they would conclude we haven’t even noticed we have an atmosphere problem”.
Right now the most important thing to do is to begin to turn.
(inadequate mixed metaphors end)
@urlyman @jgkoomey @FantasticalEconomics @ajsadauskas @green
As William Ophuls described it, we sure are electrifying the Titanic though!
😉
@green @jgkoomey @jackofalltrades @FantasticalEconomics @ajsadauskas ha!
@jackofalltrades @jgkoomey @urlyman @FantasticalEconomics @ajsadauskas @green
Makes me think of the Jevons Paradox:
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jevons_paradox
@jgkoomey
"Efficiency doesn’t cause increases in energy use except on the margin for a limited number of cases."
Can you please provide a citation for this?
@urlyman @FantasticalEconomics @jackofalltrades @ajsadauskas @green