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

    • Chookbot@theblower.au
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      1 year ago

      @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.

      #climateSurvival #climateAdaptation

    • Jonathan Koomey@mastodon.energy
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      1 year ago

      @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

      • Jonathan Schofield@mastodon.social
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        1 year ago

        @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…

        • Jonathan Schofield@mastodon.social
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          1 year ago

          @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?

          • Jonathan Koomey@mastodon.energy
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            1 year ago

            @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).

              • Jonathan Koomey@mastodon.energy
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                1 year ago

                @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.

                • Jonathan Koomey@mastodon.energy
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                  1 year ago

                  @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.

                  • Jonathan Koomey@mastodon.energy
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                    1 year ago

                    @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.

      • Jonathan Koomey@mastodon.energy
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        1 year ago

        @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

        • Jonathan Schofield@mastodon.social
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          1 year ago

          @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