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
@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.
@jackofalltrades @urlyman @ajsadauskas @green As I was careful to say in my posts above, evidence for relative decoupling is very strong. Absolute decoupling is something still being debated, but there’s no reason in principle why it can’t be done, and people who just point to historical data to argue it can’t be done have to address the literature on energy and material efficiency potentials, which are vast and largely untapped.
@jackofalltrades @urlyman @ajsadauskas @green Of course it’s important to track emissions and materials associated with imported goods manufactured elsewhere, but that doesn’t change the plain fact that there is vast potential for improving efficiency, and that potential keeps increasing all the time as technology improves.
@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
@urlyman @FantasticalEconomics @jackofalltrades @ajsadauskas @green No, that is not the case. Efficiency doesn’t cause increases in energy use except on the margin for a limited number of cases. What drives emissions up is people getting wealthier in a mostly fossil energy system. When we transform the system to be much less fossil intensive then emissions can come down even if GDP goes up.
@urlyman @FantasticalEconomics @jackofalltrades @ajsadauskas @green We need to pursue absolute decoupling of emissions from GDP, and we can, while also doing all the other things forced on us by more than 3 decades of dithering (like carbon removal). That’s the only way out of this mess.
@urlyman @FantasticalEconomics @jackofalltrades @ajsadauskas @green Remember also that absolute decoupling of energy from GDP is harder than absolute decoupling of emissions from GDP. There are many ways to supply energy services without increasing emissions.
@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
@jackofalltrades @urlyman @FantasticalEconomics @ajsadauskas @green What we have to do is unprecedented, but that doesn’t mean it can’t be done. And your judgment about what is “plausible” isn’t evidence either. My point is that absolute decoupling is possible, we just need to do it. Most people use historical examples to argue that it can’t be done, which is invalid and wrong. Will it be hard? Absolutely. But it is possible.
@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
@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
@jackofalltrades @jgkoomey @urlyman @FantasticalEconomics @ajsadauskas @green
Makes me think of the Jevons Paradox:
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jevons_paradox
@coffee2Di4 @jackofalltrades @urlyman @FantasticalEconomics @ajsadauskas @green The Jevons paradox is widely misunderstood and almost always overestimated. Jevons himself made the mistake of attributing to efficiency improvements the rapid adoption of the steam engine, but there were many other reasons why steam engines were widely adopted.
@coffee2Di4 @jackofalltrades @urlyman @FantasticalEconomics @ajsadauskas @green These reasons included higher power densities, the ability to store energy, the ability to locate motive power flexibly within factories, the ability to operate underground. Steam engines were what is known as a general purpose technology, which had wide and deep applications across society.
@coffee2Di4 @jackofalltrades @urlyman @FantasticalEconomics @ajsadauskas @green Efficiency wasn’t the sole reason for its ascendence, and probably wasn’t the most important reason, but the lesson most people take from this “effect” is that efficiency causes increases in energy use. That conclusion is almost always false.
@coffee2Di4 @jackofalltrades @urlyman @FantasticalEconomics @ajsadauskas @green In the same way, people look at aggregate statistics for energy use and say “look, efficiency causes energy use to go up” but there are many other factors pushing energy use upwards. Overall increase in wealth is the most powerful one.
@coffee2Di4 @jackofalltrades @urlyman @FantasticalEconomics @ajsadauskas @green People building bigger houses or buying bigger cars isn’t solely caused by efficiency improvements, and efficiency is nowhere near the most important contributor to this effect.
@coffee2Di4 @jackofalltrades @urlyman @FantasticalEconomics @ajsadauskas @green Technology change is complex and multifactorial, but people like to boil stuff down to simple explanations, like the Jevons Paradox. Unfortunately, these simple explanations are usually wrong.
@coffee2Di4 @jackofalltrades @urlyman @FantasticalEconomics @ajsadauskas @green PS. Anyone talking about this issue needs to distinguish between absolute decoupling of ENERGY USE from economic activity and absolute decoupling of EMISSIONS from economic activity. Achieving the latter is much easier than the former, given the many ways to power modern tech with zero emissions, but people often conflate the two.
@jgkoomey @coffee2Di4 @urlyman @FantasticalEconomics @ajsadauskas @green
What are "the many ways to power modern tech with zero emissions"? Can you list some examples?
@jackofalltrades @coffee2Di4 @urlyman @FantasticalEconomics @ajsadauskas @green People with houses and EVs powered by solar PVs + batteries is the simplest example. The embedded emissions are a transient phenomenon, once we’ve decarbonized supply chains that issue will be solved.
@jgkoomey @coffee2Di4 @urlyman @FantasticalEconomics @ajsadauskas @green
I see. By that definition hydrogen produced by steam methane reforming or biofuels are also "zero emissions".
How do you know that the embedded emissions are a transient phenomenon? Has a single EV, solar PV or battery been produced without any use of fossil fuels, even in a lab setting as a proof-of-concept?
@jackofalltrades @coffee2Di4 @urlyman @FantasticalEconomics @ajsadauskas @green No, H2 is problematic for many reasons. Even if generated from electrolysis, H2 itself is an indirect GHG.
In any case, the idea that embedded emissions are a transient phenomenon follows from that fact that almost all embedded emissions come from energy use, and in a zero emissions system, that energy use would have zero emissions.
@jgkoomey @coffee2Di4 @urlyman @FantasticalEconomics @ajsadauskas @green
"almost all embedded emissions come from energy use"
That's true if by "almost all" you mean 73%.
Even if you remove *all* emissions from energy, allow the economy to double in the next 30 years and you'll still be left with half the emissions that you started with. Not the place we want to be.
@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