Carbon counting for humans
Amid my newly founded disposition toward becoming ‘greener’, I attended an event called ClimateX. This event was hosted by the Climate Leaders Coalition of New Zealand which included many large companies, some with business models and products that seemed a far distance from being associated with ‘sustainability’. It was intended to spur action by their stakeholders and the wider community. It was in principle a hackathon to seed new ideas for climate-based businesses.
It was similar to a concept I had wanted to explore with Popcorn so I attended.
I joined a team called Kelp Save the World. This project attracted me for its multiple value outputs-a potential source of food, high value products, and the pivotal role that seaweed plays as a carbon sink..a role that is traditionally played by trees but has a much larger potential within the sea.
The project won the ClimateX hackathon and has continued on since. After a few months into it, I further investigated research papers on quantifying the carbon sequestration of seaweed.
I began to understanding CO2 on a level that I think few people do..in terms of a quantitative spend.
Check out this infographic for an overview of where we find ourselves.
Basically the world has 335 Gigatons (billions of tonnes) of CO2 left to spend before we get to 2 degrees.
The annual global rate of emissions is 36 Gigatons a year.
If you have an appreciation of math, you will realize why people are saying we have about 8 years to change things.
If carbon dioxide is treated like a spend, you could say the world is behaving like a shopaholic with a credit card that no one is monitoring. Like anything with too many impulses and little self control, most of the developed world has been doing that for decades. Now the balance is getting close to the limit, and we will bankrupt our planet. Nature is about to re-possess its property.
It’s so strange how as a society we don’t account much for our carbon footprint. Even the word ‘footprint’ invites you to not take it seriously. But if you change the word to a Carbon cost or spend… then more people would pay attention. Bankers and governments, moms and dads…they tend to care about stuff like that. Equating greenhouse gases to money means that we can use words like budget, debt, rate of spending, and interest. Imagine the government backed it up with levies, penalties, and taxes?
Yet all of that seems quite far from our day to day existence. That is part of the problem. We don’t recognize ourselves as the problem. Therefore we distance ourselves from solutions. We brush it aside, blame others, or some even deny. We need to come to terms with the truth.
The average Kiwi emits 17 tonnes a year, and the average American, 20 tonnes a year.
Out of interest, I used a website to calculate my CO2 emissions for the year. I eat meat and other groceries, use air conditioner and electricity from the grid, and live in a community where everything depends on fossil fuels, from plastic packaging on food to the bus I’m riding, to the solar panels I hope to install one day on my house. According to www.futurefit.nz, I am a 10 tonne a year emitter.
I also learned that for every $1 NZD I spent in petrol, I spent 1 kg in CO2. That means if you spend $100 filling up...that petrol will pump 100kg into the air. If I fill up once a week, it only takes 2.5 months to rack up to 1000kg, or 1 tonne of CO2. That’s 4.8 tonnes a year. On a Volkswagon Golf.
I may personally account for 10 tonnes of emissions, but there is an additional number attached to me by virtue of the fact that the country I live in has a large dairy industry and other factors (around 8 tons extra per person). According to an MIT class studying the lifestyle of Americans, even a homeless person averages 8.5 tonnes a year due to being a part of the population with heavy emissions infrastructure.
Some counties have a great per capital figure, like India at 1.16. But these countries are developing fast so their emissions are also increasing rapidly. And they have a lot of people. (CO2 emissions per country here.)
Out of interest, let’s look at what is fair and equitable.
If you divide the annual rate of emission (36 gigatons) by the population of the earth (7.6 billion), it equals 4.74 tonnes CO2 per person. That’s the status quo. We need to reduce that figure by half to have a chance of keeping it to 2 degrees. How could we all get to 2.37 tonnes each?
Buy a Prius? Buy two Priuses?
There are also carbon credits for purchase. If I have trouble meeting my targets, I have the option to offset the 10 tonnes. Current pricing varies per tonne from $25 to $250 per tonne, pricing that demonstrates the range of options and credibility. From installing methane capture systems to planting trees, this maybe a viable short term option. I even think it is possible to invest in these, as they will likely increase in value for a time. Perhaps a topic for another article. Carbon offsetting is not a long term solution, however, as there is a finite amount of offsetting possible and population growth becomes more of a factor.
However, it makes sense to quantify something if we need to reduce it. Now that I even slightly understand what 1 tonne of CO2 means, I know that I will be more conscientious of my ‘spend’, and live off a more modest ‘budget’. That’s the beauty of counting. I now intuitively understand more about the issue and the goal we are aiming for. And to reach a bottom line, we need to look for ways to improve the numbers.
As someone told me recently at a climate conference, it is the human mind that pollutes. Changing the mindset of people will be what shifts the dial. Stop polluting so much. That is what we can all do.
Watch the CO2 visualisation over a year from NASA here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fJ0o2E4d8Ts
If you feel like doing some deep diving on climate change, go to: https://drawdown.org/ Here you can explore the factors that contribute the most and to broaden awareness of climate issues.
