Is there a way to access that chart as a Google Doc, an Excel file, an HTML table, or basically any other format besides an image ? The image is pretty hard to browse.
Something I don't see discussed enough when we're talking about limiting AC/heater/other electrical usage, etc. Is that under reasonable assumptions (e.g., $50 per ton CO2 externality cost), the retail price of electricity is often already too high relative to the societal marginal cost. So just the cost you pay to your utility to use your AC is already higher than if a bunch of environmental economists got together and got to play dictator and made the retail electricity rates what they "should" be based on the marginal cost of electricity and the externalities that generating the electricity produces.
Mostly this is because the electricity industry is so heavily fixed cost based. The marginal cost of a kWh is usually in the 2 to 3 cent range. Most utility rate setters know this and always argue that utility bills should have some something like a fixed contracted demand charge of like $60 and then the per kWh price should be like 3 cents. The regulators then promptly ignore them and tell them they can have a fixed charge of $2 and a 20 cent per kWh rate because voters don't like fixed charges.
So the typical spread between retail price of kWh and marginal cost of a kWh is somewhere in the 10 cent range for the average American. But in places like California it can be much higher. And in some places the spread is lower and what I'm saying here doesn't apply to those places.
That said, if all the societal cost of pollution and carbon is less than that 10 cent gap (and if we use the realistic CO2 offset numbers found in Scott's post, they are), it means society is not over-using ACs and heaters. The benefit we get from them are greater than the cost they incur, including the added pollution and CO2.
I'm not sure what this implies for someone who cares about CO2 offsets though. On one hand, your utility bill is already priced such that if running your AC is worth the utility bill increase, it's also worth the carbon increase it causes. But on the other hand, utilities/society aren't using that money to offset CO2 like they would if there were carbon tax or cap'n'trade, they're using it to pay for all those fixed costs the regulators won't let them charge fixed amounts for. Therefore, if you don't do anything, the CO2 will be left unoffsetted. So maybe you use the AC/heater as much as you'd like given the utility bill increases it causes, then completely separately from the decision on how much AC to use, go and offset that amount?
This would all be much easier if we just had a carbon tax where revenues went to CO2 offsets or other societal improvements. It's really hard to unilaterally get this right. *sigh*
I'm curious about companies like Climeworks (although there probably are no other companies like Climeworks). It seems like they take carbon from the atmosphere and sequester it in rocks -- but isn't there some better way to use it ? I understand that sequestering carbon is the most efficient way tor reduce its concentration over time; but, on the other hand, it seems like they'd have a much higher rate of adoption if they could actually sell something useful on the output end.
Not sure if I'm completely convinced about my reasoning here, but I think conditional on the fact you are relatively bright, relatively well of, and care about this stuff, and conditional on it mattering, having one extra child might will actually have a negative carbon impact.
Someone has to invent the technologies that will reduce global carbon output, and I think my child is disproportionately likely to be that someone (obviously very unlikely in absolute terms, but still potentially positive in expectation)
Even within this framework, the "one less child number" makes zero sense.
Forget the child has a child has a child, let's just treat the child as one additional human.
If just the meat a human consumes counts as 3000lb/yr, then how can *everything* an additional human consumes count as less?
The argument seems to be something like "while that child is 4 yrs old, this is how much additional carbon it adds". And while I'm willing to stipulate, for the sake of argument (though I think it's a bad argument) that we won't consider the indefinite future progeny of our child, I'm not willing to stipulate that we pretend it will stay at the consumption level of a 4yr old forever.
If I'm reading this correctly, it would cost somewhere between $540M and $36B every year to offset carbon output for the world. Thats somewhere between 0.6% and 45% of world GDP annually to maintain the status quo. Feels like that is an unsustainable practice, both in terms of total investment and running out of space to plant trees. Isn't reducing overall carbon output a higher ROI?
I'm a huge fan of this kind of information, even if it's partly speculative--thank you!
I've recently decided that climate change is the issue I want my donation budget to go to, but have been unsure where to go from there, because the place I used to go for guidance about where to donate (GiveWell) doesn't have any recommended charities for climate change. So I was glad to get a few recommendations for organizations to donate to. I'm very much looking forward to future posts on climate change stuff!
> This post tries to quantify how much carbon is produced by various activities, lifestyle changes, and actors.
The answer to this is really simple. Unless you are talking about technologies not yet invented involving nuclear fusion and similar, the answer is simple: not one of them produces carbon.
Yes, I'm a nerd, and very fond of precision. Carbon dioxide is not the same thing as carbon, and when I read discussion of greenhouse gas emissions that carelessly conflate the two, my reaction is not to expect precision anywhere else. At the very least, the only greenhouse gas acknowledged will be "carbon", and the only unfortunate side effect of releasing carbon dioxide acknowledged will be its role as a greenhouse gas.
You, Scott, almost certainly know better. (Your professional qualifications pretty much require you to have passed college chemistry.) I'm not sure whether you are trying to write in a simple form for the generally clueless - not your usual practice - or what. Indeed, your table correctly says "LBs CO2" rather than referring to "carbon". Maybe you are trying to signal what you say explicitly a little later:
> I can’t stress enough how approximate and unreliable these numbers are. The reason I made this chart and other people didn’t isn’t because I’m smarter or harder-working than they are. It’s because I’m less responsible, and more willing to use numbers that are kind of grounded in wild guesses, and technically shouldn’t be compared to each other.
Nonetheless, I wish you'd be a bit more careful, rather than giving the impression you aren't competent to understand the sources you cite.
For Australians in the comments, I recommend GreenFleet for carbon offsets. I looked into their annual reports, back calculated how much carbon is locked up in a tree etc. and it seemed pretty legit to me. After this investigation, an environmental economist I know (who worked on the Daintree rainforest reclamation scheme) confirmed that he had been using the service for years. I’ve personally offset 10 years of my family’s emissions, planning to do another 10 years come tax time. Costs are good ($15/t AUD) and it’s easy. The basic practice is re-foresting workable, but marginally productive agricultural land (hobby farms mostly used for low profit livestock).
I personally struggle a bit with the non-tangible side of donating to political change charities, so was very happy to find this option. Also, i apologise for how much of an ad this seems like, I promise I’m not affiliated in any way.
Speaking as a former powertrain software engineer in the auto industry, I found it really interesting to see how much less polluting per fuel consumption my V8 full size truck was vs my older, tiny commuter car for going to and from work. The commuter car is very close to 2/5 the size of the truck in engine displacement and pollutes more like 1/2 as much per mile. Now, in my case, the truck was in fact purchased to move things heavier than any car could move, so it wasn't a thing that could be replaced with a significantly less polluting vehicle. Additionally, I find it interesting that we don't actually discuss the fact that modern turbocharged engines have significantly higher particulate emissions (much worse for health) to reduce carbon emissions.
I know this is more complex than what you're going for but... I cringe when I see gas plants represented (and other gas-heavy activities) represented just in terms of CO2 and not accounting for methane emissions. Gas often gets misrepresented as cleaner than it really is and it's not good for the whole climate discourse.
The most important thing is to realize that we probably need to get to net negative, not net zero.
This means scaling carbon removal (direct air capture etc) to reduce the cost/unit from 100s - 1000s $/ton to 10 - 100 $/ton, where carbon seems to be priced, if it is priced at all.
Order of magnitude decreases in unit cost is something something China is (uniquely) good at, so the most effective thing is probably high carbon prices that create an incentive to pull CO2 out of the atmosphere and (sneakily) let China steal IP of existing direct air capture devices to kickstart the manufacturing of carbon pullers at world scale.
I don't think that planting trees or the Amazon rainforest really acts as a carbon sink, at least in the sense of removing some amount of CO2 from the atmosphere every year. To take carbon from the air, it has to be converted to some other state and stored. In the case of a forest, it's in the form of plant material (wood, etc). But forests can only grow so large, and then the decaying (or burning) plants release all the stored carbon back into the air. The only carbon that is more permanently removed must be sequestered like with fossil fuels, but this process takes millions of years (and might not even occur at all with modern microorganisms), so the amount per year is insignificant.
If the Amazon is actively locking in more carbon right now, it's just because the fires cleared out prime growing space and now the trees can grow back to fill that space, which brings it back to the same carbon storage level as before. But over the natural cycle of burning and regrowth, everything probably ends up around equal. There's temporary benefits to planting trees but I'm not sure it's really significant on a global scale, especially when planted in places that may be cleared or burned again in the near future.
It might actually be more of a sustainable carbon sink to continuously harvest forests and sequester the wood, allowing new forest growth to occur. Building houses seems to keep the wood intact for at least a few decades. Turning the wood to charcoal (and storing instead of burning the charcoal) would be more permanent.
There needs to be a lot more discussion about the BENEFITS of global warming and the possibility that it could be a net GOOD.
Broke: Global warming hoax! Muh hockey stick graph! Georgia Guidestones prove the elites want you dead!!!
Woke: Climate emergency! Storms of muh grandchildren!
Bespoke: Global warming is real and is a near unalloyed good, increasing agricultural productivity through the fertilization effect, reducing droughts (a warmer planet is a wetter planet), and opening up trade routes & new resources. A planet that is 2-3C warmer will literally produce more food and be able to support a larger population.
I’m not a fan of this is kind of analysis. What can one do with it? Adding up the discrete micro changes one might come to the conclusion that the cost of reducing CO is just not worth it.
We need an incentive working through the price system for decades to make everything just enough more or less expensive to produce really big changes. Personally, I suspect that fission energy could become cheap enough to power CO2 capture so than many fossil fuel combusting activities can continue. But who knows. Maybe best set of technologies win.
Funnily enough, I don't think it's quite coherent to care both about environmental disaster (and ensuing civilizational collapse) and rogue superintelligence: the first would prevent the second!
Further complicating the Bitcoin issue, I would say a better way to value a Bitcoin transaction is to ask how much the individual is willing to pay to make it, in other words, what is the transaction fee they pay? Due to the existence of bitcoin issuance in block rewards, transaction fees only make up about 10% of the total block reward over the past year (but fluctuating wildly, see https://bitinfocharts.com/comparison/bitcoin-fee_to_reward.html#3y). So perhaps the value given for Bitcoin should be 10x smaller.
Eating a cheeseburger is the equivalent of driving a normal car about 14 miles.
Walking 14 miles would burn more calories than a cheeseburger. Google says 100 calories per mile, so 14 miles = 1400 calories. That's maybe three cheeseburgers. So walking costs 3 times more carbon than driving.
Cycling seems to burn about half the calories of walking. So cycling costs 2 times more carbon than driving.
That's by distance. By time is different. If you cycle at 1/4 the speed you drive, then cycling costs only half the carbon of driving on a per minute basis.
Assuming a motorcycle costs only half the carbon of a car, motorcycling for a minute and riding a bicycle for a minute are equivalent.
But cycling for a mile is FOUR TIMES the carbon of motorcycling for that same mile!
Remember that Hyundai commercial a few years back where they were so proud everything in the commercial was done by human power (IIRC, they had a guy on a stationary bicycle producing energy to move a backdrop to simulate the car moving)? They probably produced several times as much carbon as if they just let the machines do it.
Of course, if you get your calories from beans rather than meat, it might be less carbon. The chart doesn't say.
I object to using the word "carbon" as a short hand for carbon dioxide (CO2).
Elemental carbon is most familiar to us as amorphous black powder. As such it is literally dirty, and if areosolized and inhaled can represent a serious threat to health. It may also be found in crystalline form as diamonds, which no one regards as an environmental problem.
Carbon Dioxide on the other hand, is a colorless, odorless, non-toxic gas that is the basis of all food chains in Earth's biosphere. (yes quibblers, I know about the extremophiles).
It is pretty much unchallenged that the Atmospheric concentration of CO2, which was 280 ppm in the early 20th Century is now about 420 ppm, halfway from 280 to a doubling of 560.
Some "scientists" and some politicians claim that the increasing concentration of CO2 in the atmosphere has caused the average global temperature to increase about 1°C from 14.5 to 15.5.
This temperature increase is deputed to be responsible for all kinds of phenomenon -- wild fires, droughts, hurricanes, floods, and rising ocean levels.
Some of them say that we can mitigate or alleviate these problems by removing fossil fuels from our use of energy.
Fossil fuels are cheap, plentiful, and very useful. To get the public on board this effort, some politicians and theier media acolytes are willing to engage in propagandistic techniques.
Using Carbon (black, greasy powder) as a synonym for CO2 (life giving odorless, colorless gas, is deceptive and designed to persuade voters by using fear as an emotion.
I would like to see this practice dropped. If you mean CO2 say CO2. Don't try to conuse already difficult issues.
I'm skeptical of the "replace SUV with regular car" and "replace car with Tesla" numbers. You are going to sell your current vehicle, and someone else will drive it and emit the carbon. If you are buying a new vehicle, getting a Tesla is better than getting an SUV, but once a car is on the road it doesn't matter how often it is sold on the used market.
Isn't any difference ("difference") a U.S. or European citizen can make by minor lifestyle changes essentially a rounding error — if that! — compared to the actual causes of greenhouse gas emissions (e.g., Chinese industry, Indian agriculture, etc)? Even if everyone in the U.S. together decided to make a few of these little changes?
I would like to read an argument for the point of view that that reducing carbon emissions (or increasing carbon capture) is a) a good way to combat climate change or b) a good thing to do in general.
5% of global GDP yearly seems about right. It basically means that we can solve an existential problem by giving up on two years of growth. It's far from negligible, but it's also very doable - CO2 emissions are almost entirely a *diplomatic* issue where most countries try to dodge doing their part.
Very pleased with how the EU is doing the easy, reasonable, sensible thing - carbon costs plus carbon tolls. This is essentially all that's needed (although the carbon is costed too low still) - the market will sort the rest out.
The two most important lacks I see in this chart are:
(1) It doesn't account for the variation in where your power comes from, which is very important. There is only one source of *new* CO2 into the atmosphere, and that is the combustion of fossil fuels.
For example, let's say you live in Quebec and 90% of your electricity comes from hydro. If you and someone from Indiana, say, whose electricity comes entirely from a coal plant, indulge in the same activity that requires the consumption of X kWh of electricity, then the amount of "carbon" you've contributed is 1/10 that the Indianan contributed.
For the same reason, Frenchmen have a lower "carbon" footprint than Englishmen for the exact same activities, and Californians have a lower footprint than Midwesterners.
(2) It doesn't account for the "carbon" costs of making changes. For example, building a Tesla involves significantly more CO2 emission than building a Honda Accord. People tend to think it works out over the lifetime of the car, if the Tesla uses electricity from some reasonably modest CO2 emitting source, the car is kept a long time, nobody adjusts his behavior in response, but my impression is that it's a close call at best, and it's possible in some cases the net CO2 emission of the change is unfortunately positive.
For that matter, if you consider switching *everybody* in the US to electric cars, and expanding the electricity generation and transmission infrastructure by 40% -- wow, that capital cost in "carbon" is staggering, and the payback period (meaning when you reach net negative "carbon") would probably be decades.
I wouldn't expect you to add some more dimensions to your chart, because of the lack of 3D holographic monitors among your readership, but I feel these are valuable footnotes to add, just so that people consider these "background" issues, too, which can in cases dwarf any "foreground" choice.
Hey Scott, I see no other way to contact you in general so I guess I should use a comment. Under what license can your posts (or their content) be used by third parties? Old blog as said here (https://slatestarcodex.com/about/) was under CC BY 4.0 - is that still the case? Is there a difference in paid/free posts? What about images like the blog icon or your avatar? I don't have any particular use in mind right now, so if license depends on the use, that'd be good to know too. Thanks in advance.
Sometimes I wonder how better city planning that would incentivize more bycicle use could have an impact on climate and health. Especially American cities seem poorly planned. This YouTuber really opened my eyes to this:
There seems to be an obvious discrepancy between "Fly on a 747 LA → NYC" and "Send a 747 LA → NYC". The emission ratio implies 180 passengers, while the cost ratio implies 1079 passengers, resulting in a 6-fold difference in "% cost". There could be some difference based on how the costs are calculated, or perhaps if the airliner hauls some cargo for money in addition to the passengers and their luggage, but not this much.
Amazon forest is the only one left ? I know Californians are burning what they have left, for example, but I always consider waaay too political to just pinpoint Amazon as the only one that matters for the world.
> It’s because I’m less responsible [...] they’re probably mostly order-of-magnitude correct, and I believe having probably mostly order-of-magnitude correct estimates is better than having no estimates at all.
We should just popularize measuring CO2 emissions in dB.
Because I am in incurable smartarse, while I appreciated the differentiation between "Amazon (the rainforest)" and "Amazon (the company)", I at once thought "but what about 'Amazon (the queen Hippolyta)'?"
I am rather sceptical towards the idea of offsetting fossil fuels by planting trees.
From my understanding, fossil fuels are very much part of the deep carbon cycle, having been removed from the biosphere for millions of years. Taking that out of the earth, burning it and then paying for someone to plant or keep a tree for (optimistically) some hundred years does not really seem sufficient here.
Of course, on a short time scale, trees might help. If the main goal is to keep the permafrost carbon in place for the next century, or just keep the sea water from rising to much until until fusion power, the second coming, or the singularity etc arrives and a long term solution is reached, trees might be worthwhile. Still, it is a band-aid at best.
What I do not know (and was unable to find quickly) is how long an additional ton of CO2 from fossil fuels will remain in the biosphere carbon cycle until the carbon ends up on the sea floor and enters the deep cycle again. There probably should be an effective half-life (more CO2 -> more plankton -> more seabed carbon)? Of course, this also assumes that the system is still in equilibrium and not in runaway mode (permafrost CO2 being released etc), so this point is probably moot.
The Climeworks approach of turning CO2 into carbonate rock seems better. While I am generally sceptical of geo-sequestration (e.g. just pumping the CO2 into underground structures and hope it happens to stay there forever) to the point of assuming it to be green-washing, carbonates such as CaCO3 are what even I would call a long-term storage, given that limestone mountains are a thing.
Naturally, as long as there are still people around irresponsible enough to burn fossil fuels for primary energy, it would probably be easier to capture the exhaust of the power plants directly instead of getting it out of the air. Still, I can see why one would not want to have a business model depending on irresponsible people.
Although this is an interesting academic exercise the bulk of future emission increases that would make warming a threat are from developing nations raising their standard of living and increasing their populations.
I think these type of efforts are mostly vanity exercises (not accusing this specific author of this) that willfully ignore fundamental problems. If you want to reduce global emissions then you need to make it cheap and easy for people who barely have indoor plumbing to improve their standard of living with low carbon energy.
Professionals contemplating reducing their hours of AC in SF (this is laughable from a Florida perspective) isn't a good guideline to how poor people in Africa are going to behave when their standard of living allows them to have AC. If building a local coal plant makes this half the cost of unsubsidized solar energy then they will make a very predictable decision. See Roger Pielke Jr's decade old iron law of climate policy.
The best thing we can do is use our technical ability to make the cost of low carbon energy cheaper than fossil fuels. Almost everything should be focused on this objective given how increased global emissions will evolve over time and how real world economic decisions are routinely made. Eating less cheeseburgers is a useless distraction.
Much progress has been made on making low carbon energy cheaper. The developing world needs to see choosing this power option as an obvious choice without a condescending first world climate guilt lecture. That's how we make progress.
- Cool post, agree that it's better to have somewhat inaccurate estimates than to have none. Thank you for promoting climate action!
- Emissions from anything related to electricity depend a lot on the source of that electricity, so I'm not sure how useful the averages are. If you can, it's better to use zero-carbon electricity instead of reducing electricity consumption.
- Emissions from having children are indeed very philosophically complicated. Your approach kind of makes sense, but if you heavily discount future emissions like this, it would make sense to apply the same kind of discounting in other estimates. AFAIK, most people who calculate emissions estimates for various activities don't do this so there's a bit of inconsistency. I don't really have a proposal on how to do this better. I also think that children of climate-conscious people can very well have a positive impact on climate in the future, so go figure.
- Offsets are almost as complicated as emissions from children. My wife, who advises governments on carbon markets, says that for the most part they don't work (because the reductions are not counted against a realistic baseline, there's double-counting, there's no permanence of emission reductions and a host of other problems). Climateworks and similar projects are reasonable though. The best way that we have identified so far is buying credits in a trustworthy emissions trading system like EU ETS and holding them (cancelling them will not work in the case of EU ETS because of a thing called Market Stability Reserve that will release more credits into the market if the supply is too low). There's a company that allows individual to do this: https://www.compensators.org/ -- for as long as the EU doesn't revise how the EU ETS works, this might be a good way. Even better way it to not create the emissions in the first place.
- Planting / saving trees I would see as one of the least reliable forms of offsetting, since with trees you're sending carbon into the future instead of removing it from the cycle. How far into the future is anyone's guess. There are some projects that take permanence somewhat seriously, so you need pay attention to this, if you are into offsetting via planting trees.
- My friends who did research on individual action against climate change say that the most impactful way is political action (which is high on your list). Unfortunately climate-conscious politicians often bring other problems with them (e.g. in Germany the Green Party is anti-nuclear and has some socialist policies that I don't support). I guess it's the same problem as with any other voting: hard to find parties that do no harm in addition to the good that you want them to do.
I'm sort of surprised that running a dryer is less than one cheeseburger! Since cheese is about half the emissions of beef, and I'm a vegetarian, I wonder if that means that a dryer cycle is comparable to a grilled cheese.
I'm also surprised that adjusting the thermostat by a couple degrees is already a tenth as valuable as being vegetarian!
It was a cool Wednesday morning when I first met Jordan, a middle-aged young man from Twin Falls, Idaho. He had just finished making his shitty keurig coffee before sitting down at the dilapidated PC he built for gaming 8 years ago. As he does every morning, he began working through his morning list of news and blog posts. He noticed a new post on Astral Codex Ten and was eager to begin reading. "What could this one be about?" he asked out loud. But suddenly, his faced filled with dread and he prayed out loud: "God I really hope he doesn't fucking open with some story filled with minute and distracting details. Why does every goddamn article and blog post need to start with a long story before saying the thing they wanted to say!? In my work, this form of self-flagellation is just part of the daily grind" he told me. He began to say something else, but halted and quickly abandoned the thought. After a sigh, he followed the link to Scott's new post.
"Oh, look!" Jordan exclaimed. "Scott just starts the article by saying the thing he wanted to say. I fucking love Scott" he said while wearing the stupidest grin one could imagine. Jordan later told me that his days don't normally begin like this and that [insert transition]...
Am I the only one thinking that carbon offsets are basically useless? There's the issue Scott mentions, but I think the bigger picture is the cost of buying them means the temptation to free-ride here is enormous, so almost nobody does it. What percentage of people who consider themselves environmentalists and who are concerned about climate change have ever in their lives purchased any dollar amount of carbon offsets, much less do so regularly? I'll bet it's under 5%.
There are major omissions and fundamental problems with this analysis, and its conclusions are accordingly misguided and empty.
In sum first, substantiated below:
1/ Household consumption is brushed off as insignificant when it is actually 60% of global greenhouse gas generation, and only direct generation is considered.
3/ This fails to acknowledge or address consumer culture and the profligate waste it engenders.
4/ The import of the figures in the tables for individual activities & actions are grossly minimized by a/ using individual instead of population magnitudes and b/ by using discrete single usage figures instead of annual amounts.
5/ This analysis implicitly wishes for a silver bullet and denies the potential for many smaller changes to make a significant difference in aggregate.
6/ The discussion only posits absurdly hyperbolic options as the alternatives to inaction and resignation.
7/ There is, contra the framing here, abundant cause to conclude that it is more than worthwhile for individuals to invest some of their time and energy toward more conscious consumption and sustainability.
In detail:
1/ Household consumption is estimated to contribute over 60% of global greenhouse gas emissions. (1) Only ~20% is directly generated; the other 40% are generated indirectly by upstream production and trade networks. (2) The “personal activity” section ignores this entirely, considering only direct generation. This omission alone invalidates the conclusions.
2/ Compounding the above, wealthy households contribute disproportionately to GHG emissions. The US is proportional worse than the globe, and wealthier Americans are worse than their compatriots. US households with $150k annual income produce over 2x the average American household, and 4-5x low income households. (2)
Given household consumption generates 60+% of emissions globally, we can therefore conclude that American household emissions represent a disproportionate fraction of that amount. It is therefore worthwhile–necessary even–for Americans to make efforts to mitigate our household impact.
3/ Any examination of individual behaviors and their contribution to climate change that fails to address consumer culture and the profligate waste it engenders is not a serious one. Clothing is a salient example: the fashion industry is estimated (3) to generate 10% of annual global carbon emissions and 20% of global wastewater. And textiles are the largest segment of the US post-consumer waste stream. Producing a *single pair* of Levi’s 501 jeans generates 30 lbs of carbon emissions. (4)
Should we really believe that there’s no room for individual choice to affect this? Could we halve the amount of clothing we consume by choosing quality over quantity and questioning our compulsion for novelty? Should one repair a ripped pant seam instead of just buying a new pair from Old Navy for $20? Or is that “obsessing too much”?
4/ The import of the figures in the tables for individual activities & actions are grossly minimized by a/ using individual instead of population magnitudes and b/ by using discrete single usage figures instead of annual amounts.
Take driving: The table only cites a single car trip of 20 miles, but the average American drives 13,500 mi/Y (5), and there are 328M Americans. 16 lbs for a short trip certainly looks trivial, but hundreds of millions of people, each taking hundreds of such trips is huge. Indeed, cars & light trucks generated 17% of total US GHG emissions in 2018 (8,9). Using your figure of 16 lbs/20 mi driven and estimating 2/3 the population of 328M are drivers, that’s 2,400 Billion lbs of CO2/Y. There are myriad ways for an individual to reduce their personal contribution to this from alternative modes to fewer trips to modified driving style to… the list goes on.
Or air conditioning: There are about 100 million homes in the US with air conditioning. If your 2° AC savings is correct, that’s as much as 24 Billion fewer lbs CO2 emitted / year.
The decision to hide the scale effects obscures the reality that individual behaviors *in aggregate* are often major contributors, and therefore individuals do have cause (a responsibility, even) to inspect and perhaps amend their own practices.
5/ This analysis implicitly denies the potential for many smaller changes to make a significant difference in aggregate. We should not expect or seek a silver bullet solution to climate change.
6/ “all you have to do is spend 11,000 hours without air conditioning, and you'll have saved the same amount of carbon an F-35 burns on one airstrike”
Here one begins to wonder if this is all just trolling. This is an obviously false dichotomy and, as shown above, totally ignores the relative scale. 100 million homes, 2° AC adjustment -> 24 Billion fewer lbs CO2 emitted. If the US flies 10,000 F-35 sorties per yer, that’s 0.57 Billion lbs CO2.
7/ There is, contra the framing here, abundant cause to conclude that it is more than worthwhile for individuals to invest some of their time and energy toward more conscious consumption and sustainability.
The suggested actions are nothing more than a modern version of the assurance that if you just read your scripture (stay informed), say your prayers (vote), tithe on Sundays (donate to charities), and occasionally buy an indulgence (offsets), you can sleep soundly at night with the knowledge you’ll be granted passage at the pearly gates.
“You don’t need to obsess too much…or give up too many of the things you enjoy”
This is tautological and completely fails to engage the issue honestly. The question is not whether one needs to OBSESS or go full ascetic, rather it is whether one should be investing some nontrivial amount of time and effort to be more conscious about consumption and live sustainably.
Climeworks charges $1000 / ton? Why not grow ironwood, then barge it out into the ocean and sink it. Surely that could sequester a ton for less than a thousand bucks.
I realise this may have been addressed in part. But the best question is not ‘how would MY carbon reduction compare with an F14/the Us military/China?’. It’s ‘how would OUR carbon reduction compare?’. It would be helpful if you could to include some rough multiplication factors for various total populations to allow people to estimate the sum-in-aggregate. For example I’ve had a stab using the data here (https://worldpopulationreview.com/country-rankings/first-world-countries). I tried to take a middle line about the eventual outcome. Taking only the top 30 most developed countries (Norway down to Estonia) totals just over 1Bn population in 2021. Assuming that only one-third of people in those countries can be convinced, eventually, to significantly change their habits gives a multiplication factor to your ‘lifestyle’ column of roughly 340 million. If those 340m people completely decarbonise, by your figures, it would reduce carbon use by nearly 11,000 Bn lbs CO2 per year - bigger than any single emitter on the list except China. Does this not suggest the benefit of finding incentives to persuade the most receptive people to act as a collective?
I'd support a pigouvian tax on carbon emissions (and all other forms of pollution) where the proceeds are given back as UBI. That's really the only policy that's needed on climate, aside from getting out of the way of private industry that wants to build nuclear/renewables. (Zoning/HOAs need to stop prohibiting solar roofs in some places).
But I strongly object to a lot of the apocalyptic rhetoric of some. Cities are thriving right now in temperatures ranging from -40C to +50C. It's absurd that humans wouldn't be able to cope with the difference between 2C and 4C globally.
If we assume for the sake of argument that's true, and we also use Scott's median $100/ton carbon offset cost, then it costs $434,400 to save one life through carbon offsets. That's a couple orders of magnitude worse than malaria nets.
Does anyone know of an estimation which carbon prices a given carbon cap (from an Emission Trading Scheme) entails? Or vice-versa: how a given carbon price from a carbon tax would influence emissions? this relation seems vital to me, yet I havn't seen any study on it.
More specifically, economists would have to study how a certain carbon price (from a tax or a trading scheme) influences the demand for each economic good (apples, meat, concrete, gas, electricity...). Finally, they would have to add up how much carbon is produced by the remaining consumtion. This is vitally important for answering the "social question" of how much poor people will be priced out of carbon production.
I find the idea of sequestering carbon "permanently" such a turn-off. It's not just that it's a waste of a valuable resource. There's something like a kind of a biological nihilism about it, or at the very least, a sweeping, nonchalant, ignorance about the implied risks.
Imagine we had massive permanent-sequestration capability and then, I dunno, accidentally left it running one weekend, taking global atmospheric CO2 below ~100ppm. The result would be dinosaur-extinction-astroid-impact level destructive. Except worse, because now that the carbon is inorganic and inaccessible, life is not going to just sort of... bounce back.
Obviously nobody is actually trying to scrub every last molecule from the atmosphere, but my problem is that people are starting to act as though CO2 basically nuclear waste. All downside. I reckon if you ask a bunch of 20-somethings who've been steeped in this there whole lives, "what is the ideal level of CO2", a significant fraction will say "zero".
Even if "permanent" doesn't mean "irreversible" sequestration, it seems irresponsible to be treating the carbon cycle as something that can be "shorted to ground", to use a random electrical metaphor.
It's sci-fi until it isn't. When we do develop planetary-scale sequestration capability, it seems pretty obvious we'll have to treat it like a nuclear arsenal. (It's the same with most other geohacking ideas.)
I wish we could add at least one traditional bank to the list. I have friends who are into bitcoin, and when someone mentions how carbon intensive BTC is, they counter that it's equivalent to the carbon use of other common ways that people invest or save their money.
The train trip LA -> New York seems way too high in cost. The train is supposed to be the most efficient way to travel after bicycle. Also, the native.eco calculator Scott linked as the source states 0.28 carbon tons for the trip.
Awesome! I've been researching this a lot recently and have some information to share:
I recommend donating to founderspledge.com/funds/climate-change-fund instead of catf. They are a fund that transfers the money to a portfolio of non profits after thorough analysis, including catf.
I've been able to get a lot of my friends to donate, I think that with simple enough explanations it's possible to get a large portion of the western population to donate. I think most people care about climate change, but most of them don't know what to do to help. My current recommendation is donating %1 of income - It's an easy to swallow amount that allows high income individuals to offset tens of people.
My best estimate of the price of carbon offset is ~$5/ton (order of magnitude), when donating to founders pledge. In their 2018 research founders pledge estimates that for catf it's 0.1-1$/ton. The greenclimate.fund claim they abated approximately 1.8 billion tons with 8.9 billion dollars of funding - that's $5/ton. I assume they are less effective than catf, and that also they might have exaggerated the carbon amount. Other estimates (such as those in the post) are higher than $5. I remember vaguely that investing in solar is about $20-30/ton, if it's important to someone I'll find the source.
The fundamental assumption that "people existing is bad for the climate" is not just wrong; it's completely backwards.
Everything good that our civilization will ever create in the future, including climate change solutions, will be created by people. And to create good things, people need resources. The fewer children we (as a civilization) have, the fewer people there will be to create things. And, just as importantly, the less economic growth there will be to provide resources for that creation.
The fewer children we have, the less likely we are to ever solve ANY major problem, of which climate change is just one (looking at you, asteroids). And that's not just because a small number of children might grow up to individually do import things for the climate, a la Elon Musk; Tesla could never have succeeded without solid and affordable access to raw materials, supply chains, investors, talent pools, capital, customers, business services, contractors, etc. (And in fact, think how much more effective Tesla, and maybe a non-existent competitor or two, could be right now if the economy were much bigger, giving them access to much superior resources).
More children = more chances for an hypothetical future-problem-solver to be born. But far more relevant and less wishy-washy is: more children = more economic growth = more resources for the many not-hypothetical-problem-solvers to utilize.
Solving climate change will require a lot of new knowledge and new technology. It will also require the expenditure of a huge amount of wealth. The more wealth we have to spare, the better the odds are that we'll be willing to spend some of it on this problem.
Greatly increasing immigration from developing countries to developed ones would help in the same way; by migrating, people gain better access to resources, which makes them more productive. And there are also plenty of humanitarian reasons to support more migration. This is often used as a counter-argument to having more children, saying that we should favor immigration instead. Let's put aside the fact that this makes no sense in its own terms, given that migrating to the developed world increases a person's carbon footprint more-or-less in proportion to how much it increases their productivity. But increasing immigration and increasing birth rate have basically nothing to do with each other, and there's no reason why favoring one would imply not favoring the other. I think we should favor both.
Just as an addendum: the only reason to care about climate change at all is because it will negatively affect humans (even if the most apocalyptic predictions all came true and humanity was wiped out, there's no universe in which the biosphere itself would fail to recover). So really our choices are: have more kids, and solve climate change; or stop having kids, and don't fucking bother.
One number really impressed me, and it must be kind of a blind spot that nobody here addressed it here by now:
Assuming these numbers are correct, the US military is responsible for 1/4 of all US emissions. 3 times the UK. This is just insane.
This means for me that every politician (or even person) who worries about climate change but does not call for a substantial reduction of the US-Military can not be taken serious.
To produce one ton of anything in one year, someone or something would have to produce more than six pounds in every second in that year. (There are 31,556,952 seconds in one Gregorian year. There are 2,000 pounds in one ton. 31,556,952 seconds divided by 2,000 pounds equals 6.337 pounds per seconds. How much would a bull have to weigh to produce to produce that much fecal matter every second it is alive?
Is there a way to access that chart as a Google Doc, an Excel file, an HTML table, or basically any other format besides an image ? The image is pretty hard to browse.
Something I don't see discussed enough when we're talking about limiting AC/heater/other electrical usage, etc. Is that under reasonable assumptions (e.g., $50 per ton CO2 externality cost), the retail price of electricity is often already too high relative to the societal marginal cost. So just the cost you pay to your utility to use your AC is already higher than if a bunch of environmental economists got together and got to play dictator and made the retail electricity rates what they "should" be based on the marginal cost of electricity and the externalities that generating the electricity produces.
Mostly this is because the electricity industry is so heavily fixed cost based. The marginal cost of a kWh is usually in the 2 to 3 cent range. Most utility rate setters know this and always argue that utility bills should have some something like a fixed contracted demand charge of like $60 and then the per kWh price should be like 3 cents. The regulators then promptly ignore them and tell them they can have a fixed charge of $2 and a 20 cent per kWh rate because voters don't like fixed charges.
So the typical spread between retail price of kWh and marginal cost of a kWh is somewhere in the 10 cent range for the average American. But in places like California it can be much higher. And in some places the spread is lower and what I'm saying here doesn't apply to those places.
That said, if all the societal cost of pollution and carbon is less than that 10 cent gap (and if we use the realistic CO2 offset numbers found in Scott's post, they are), it means society is not over-using ACs and heaters. The benefit we get from them are greater than the cost they incur, including the added pollution and CO2.
I'm not sure what this implies for someone who cares about CO2 offsets though. On one hand, your utility bill is already priced such that if running your AC is worth the utility bill increase, it's also worth the carbon increase it causes. But on the other hand, utilities/society aren't using that money to offset CO2 like they would if there were carbon tax or cap'n'trade, they're using it to pay for all those fixed costs the regulators won't let them charge fixed amounts for. Therefore, if you don't do anything, the CO2 will be left unoffsetted. So maybe you use the AC/heater as much as you'd like given the utility bill increases it causes, then completely separately from the decision on how much AC to use, go and offset that amount?
This would all be much easier if we just had a carbon tax where revenues went to CO2 offsets or other societal improvements. It's really hard to unilaterally get this right. *sigh*
What is the easiest way to convince oneself that carbon = bad?
I'm curious about companies like Climeworks (although there probably are no other companies like Climeworks). It seems like they take carbon from the atmosphere and sequester it in rocks -- but isn't there some better way to use it ? I understand that sequestering carbon is the most efficient way tor reduce its concentration over time; but, on the other hand, it seems like they'd have a much higher rate of adoption if they could actually sell something useful on the output end.
Am I the only one extremely disappointed that leaf blowers didn't make the cut?
Not sure if I'm completely convinced about my reasoning here, but I think conditional on the fact you are relatively bright, relatively well of, and care about this stuff, and conditional on it mattering, having one extra child might will actually have a negative carbon impact.
Someone has to invent the technologies that will reduce global carbon output, and I think my child is disproportionately likely to be that someone (obviously very unlikely in absolute terms, but still potentially positive in expectation)
"Keep heat 2F warmer in winter"
I think you mean cooler.
Even within this framework, the "one less child number" makes zero sense.
Forget the child has a child has a child, let's just treat the child as one additional human.
If just the meat a human consumes counts as 3000lb/yr, then how can *everything* an additional human consumes count as less?
The argument seems to be something like "while that child is 4 yrs old, this is how much additional carbon it adds". And while I'm willing to stipulate, for the sake of argument (though I think it's a bad argument) that we won't consider the indefinite future progeny of our child, I'm not willing to stipulate that we pretend it will stay at the consumption level of a 4yr old forever.
If I'm reading this correctly, it would cost somewhere between $540M and $36B every year to offset carbon output for the world. Thats somewhere between 0.6% and 45% of world GDP annually to maintain the status quo. Feels like that is an unsustainable practice, both in terms of total investment and running out of space to plant trees. Isn't reducing overall carbon output a higher ROI?
I'm a huge fan of this kind of information, even if it's partly speculative--thank you!
I've recently decided that climate change is the issue I want my donation budget to go to, but have been unsure where to go from there, because the place I used to go for guidance about where to donate (GiveWell) doesn't have any recommended charities for climate change. So I was glad to get a few recommendations for organizations to donate to. I'm very much looking forward to future posts on climate change stuff!
> This post tries to quantify how much carbon is produced by various activities, lifestyle changes, and actors.
The answer to this is really simple. Unless you are talking about technologies not yet invented involving nuclear fusion and similar, the answer is simple: not one of them produces carbon.
Yes, I'm a nerd, and very fond of precision. Carbon dioxide is not the same thing as carbon, and when I read discussion of greenhouse gas emissions that carelessly conflate the two, my reaction is not to expect precision anywhere else. At the very least, the only greenhouse gas acknowledged will be "carbon", and the only unfortunate side effect of releasing carbon dioxide acknowledged will be its role as a greenhouse gas.
You, Scott, almost certainly know better. (Your professional qualifications pretty much require you to have passed college chemistry.) I'm not sure whether you are trying to write in a simple form for the generally clueless - not your usual practice - or what. Indeed, your table correctly says "LBs CO2" rather than referring to "carbon". Maybe you are trying to signal what you say explicitly a little later:
> I can’t stress enough how approximate and unreliable these numbers are. The reason I made this chart and other people didn’t isn’t because I’m smarter or harder-working than they are. It’s because I’m less responsible, and more willing to use numbers that are kind of grounded in wild guesses, and technically shouldn’t be compared to each other.
Nonetheless, I wish you'd be a bit more careful, rather than giving the impression you aren't competent to understand the sources you cite.
For Australians in the comments, I recommend GreenFleet for carbon offsets. I looked into their annual reports, back calculated how much carbon is locked up in a tree etc. and it seemed pretty legit to me. After this investigation, an environmental economist I know (who worked on the Daintree rainforest reclamation scheme) confirmed that he had been using the service for years. I’ve personally offset 10 years of my family’s emissions, planning to do another 10 years come tax time. Costs are good ($15/t AUD) and it’s easy. The basic practice is re-foresting workable, but marginally productive agricultural land (hobby farms mostly used for low profit livestock).
I personally struggle a bit with the non-tangible side of donating to political change charities, so was very happy to find this option. Also, i apologise for how much of an ad this seems like, I promise I’m not affiliated in any way.
Footnote 9 probably should be [removed]?
Sometimes Scott makes me think of this guy. I should say I mean this in the kindest most complimentary way. :)
https://www.google.com/amp/s/www.theonion.com/freak-actually-knows-how-big-an-acre-is-1847253085/amp
Speaking as a former powertrain software engineer in the auto industry, I found it really interesting to see how much less polluting per fuel consumption my V8 full size truck was vs my older, tiny commuter car for going to and from work. The commuter car is very close to 2/5 the size of the truck in engine displacement and pollutes more like 1/2 as much per mile. Now, in my case, the truck was in fact purchased to move things heavier than any car could move, so it wasn't a thing that could be replaced with a significantly less polluting vehicle. Additionally, I find it interesting that we don't actually discuss the fact that modern turbocharged engines have significantly higher particulate emissions (much worse for health) to reduce carbon emissions.
I know this is more complex than what you're going for but... I cringe when I see gas plants represented (and other gas-heavy activities) represented just in terms of CO2 and not accounting for methane emissions. Gas often gets misrepresented as cleaner than it really is and it's not good for the whole climate discourse.
Great post.
The most important thing is to realize that we probably need to get to net negative, not net zero.
This means scaling carbon removal (direct air capture etc) to reduce the cost/unit from 100s - 1000s $/ton to 10 - 100 $/ton, where carbon seems to be priced, if it is priced at all.
Order of magnitude decreases in unit cost is something something China is (uniquely) good at, so the most effective thing is probably high carbon prices that create an incentive to pull CO2 out of the atmosphere and (sneakily) let China steal IP of existing direct air capture devices to kickstart the manufacturing of carbon pullers at world scale.
How much does it cost to offset one pair of disposable chopsticks, as opposed to washing reusable ones? My ex roommate criticized me for this.
This is great, thank you!
I don't think that planting trees or the Amazon rainforest really acts as a carbon sink, at least in the sense of removing some amount of CO2 from the atmosphere every year. To take carbon from the air, it has to be converted to some other state and stored. In the case of a forest, it's in the form of plant material (wood, etc). But forests can only grow so large, and then the decaying (or burning) plants release all the stored carbon back into the air. The only carbon that is more permanently removed must be sequestered like with fossil fuels, but this process takes millions of years (and might not even occur at all with modern microorganisms), so the amount per year is insignificant.
If the Amazon is actively locking in more carbon right now, it's just because the fires cleared out prime growing space and now the trees can grow back to fill that space, which brings it back to the same carbon storage level as before. But over the natural cycle of burning and regrowth, everything probably ends up around equal. There's temporary benefits to planting trees but I'm not sure it's really significant on a global scale, especially when planted in places that may be cleared or burned again in the near future.
It might actually be more of a sustainable carbon sink to continuously harvest forests and sequester the wood, allowing new forest growth to occur. Building houses seems to keep the wood intact for at least a few decades. Turning the wood to charcoal (and storing instead of burning the charcoal) would be more permanent.
There needs to be a lot more discussion about the BENEFITS of global warming and the possibility that it could be a net GOOD.
Broke: Global warming hoax! Muh hockey stick graph! Georgia Guidestones prove the elites want you dead!!!
Woke: Climate emergency! Storms of muh grandchildren!
Bespoke: Global warming is real and is a near unalloyed good, increasing agricultural productivity through the fertilization effect, reducing droughts (a warmer planet is a wetter planet), and opening up trade routes & new resources. A planet that is 2-3C warmer will literally produce more food and be able to support a larger population.
Here's a book that considers this topic in detail (which, incidentally, is written by the brother of one of the creators of the internet, no less): https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/7230015-how-bad-are-bananas
I’m not a fan of this is kind of analysis. What can one do with it? Adding up the discrete micro changes one might come to the conclusion that the cost of reducing CO is just not worth it.
We need an incentive working through the price system for decades to make everything just enough more or less expensive to produce really big changes. Personally, I suspect that fission energy could become cheap enough to power CO2 capture so than many fossil fuel combusting activities can continue. But who knows. Maybe best set of technologies win.
Funnily enough, I don't think it's quite coherent to care both about environmental disaster (and ensuing civilizational collapse) and rogue superintelligence: the first would prevent the second!
E.g. https://twitter.com/GoodVibesNoAI/status/1423769971382001664
Further complicating the Bitcoin issue, I would say a better way to value a Bitcoin transaction is to ask how much the individual is willing to pay to make it, in other words, what is the transaction fee they pay? Due to the existence of bitcoin issuance in block rewards, transaction fees only make up about 10% of the total block reward over the past year (but fluctuating wildly, see https://bitinfocharts.com/comparison/bitcoin-fee_to_reward.html#3y). So perhaps the value given for Bitcoin should be 10x smaller.
Eating a cheeseburger is the equivalent of driving a normal car about 14 miles.
Walking 14 miles would burn more calories than a cheeseburger. Google says 100 calories per mile, so 14 miles = 1400 calories. That's maybe three cheeseburgers. So walking costs 3 times more carbon than driving.
Cycling seems to burn about half the calories of walking. So cycling costs 2 times more carbon than driving.
That's by distance. By time is different. If you cycle at 1/4 the speed you drive, then cycling costs only half the carbon of driving on a per minute basis.
Assuming a motorcycle costs only half the carbon of a car, motorcycling for a minute and riding a bicycle for a minute are equivalent.
But cycling for a mile is FOUR TIMES the carbon of motorcycling for that same mile!
Remember that Hyundai commercial a few years back where they were so proud everything in the commercial was done by human power (IIRC, they had a guy on a stationary bicycle producing energy to move a backdrop to simulate the car moving)? They probably produced several times as much carbon as if they just let the machines do it.
Of course, if you get your calories from beans rather than meat, it might be less carbon. The chart doesn't say.
I object to using the word "carbon" as a short hand for carbon dioxide (CO2).
Elemental carbon is most familiar to us as amorphous black powder. As such it is literally dirty, and if areosolized and inhaled can represent a serious threat to health. It may also be found in crystalline form as diamonds, which no one regards as an environmental problem.
Carbon Dioxide on the other hand, is a colorless, odorless, non-toxic gas that is the basis of all food chains in Earth's biosphere. (yes quibblers, I know about the extremophiles).
It is pretty much unchallenged that the Atmospheric concentration of CO2, which was 280 ppm in the early 20th Century is now about 420 ppm, halfway from 280 to a doubling of 560.
Some "scientists" and some politicians claim that the increasing concentration of CO2 in the atmosphere has caused the average global temperature to increase about 1°C from 14.5 to 15.5.
This temperature increase is deputed to be responsible for all kinds of phenomenon -- wild fires, droughts, hurricanes, floods, and rising ocean levels.
Some of them say that we can mitigate or alleviate these problems by removing fossil fuels from our use of energy.
Fossil fuels are cheap, plentiful, and very useful. To get the public on board this effort, some politicians and theier media acolytes are willing to engage in propagandistic techniques.
Using Carbon (black, greasy powder) as a synonym for CO2 (life giving odorless, colorless gas, is deceptive and designed to persuade voters by using fear as an emotion.
I would like to see this practice dropped. If you mean CO2 say CO2. Don't try to conuse already difficult issues.
I'm skeptical of the "replace SUV with regular car" and "replace car with Tesla" numbers. You are going to sell your current vehicle, and someone else will drive it and emit the carbon. If you are buying a new vehicle, getting a Tesla is better than getting an SUV, but once a car is on the road it doesn't matter how often it is sold on the used market.
Isn't any difference ("difference") a U.S. or European citizen can make by minor lifestyle changes essentially a rounding error — if that! — compared to the actual causes of greenhouse gas emissions (e.g., Chinese industry, Indian agriculture, etc)? Even if everyone in the U.S. together decided to make a few of these little changes?
Thanks Scott. Much appreciated.
I would like to read an argument for the point of view that that reducing carbon emissions (or increasing carbon capture) is a) a good way to combat climate change or b) a good thing to do in general.
A number of people seem to take this as obvious (like here: https://www.nytimes.com/2021/08/09/climate/climate-change-report-ipcc-un.html), but I don't see why.
5% of global GDP yearly seems about right. It basically means that we can solve an existential problem by giving up on two years of growth. It's far from negligible, but it's also very doable - CO2 emissions are almost entirely a *diplomatic* issue where most countries try to dodge doing their part.
Very pleased with how the EU is doing the easy, reasonable, sensible thing - carbon costs plus carbon tolls. This is essentially all that's needed (although the carbon is costed too low still) - the market will sort the rest out.
The two most important lacks I see in this chart are:
(1) It doesn't account for the variation in where your power comes from, which is very important. There is only one source of *new* CO2 into the atmosphere, and that is the combustion of fossil fuels.
For example, let's say you live in Quebec and 90% of your electricity comes from hydro. If you and someone from Indiana, say, whose electricity comes entirely from a coal plant, indulge in the same activity that requires the consumption of X kWh of electricity, then the amount of "carbon" you've contributed is 1/10 that the Indianan contributed.
For the same reason, Frenchmen have a lower "carbon" footprint than Englishmen for the exact same activities, and Californians have a lower footprint than Midwesterners.
(2) It doesn't account for the "carbon" costs of making changes. For example, building a Tesla involves significantly more CO2 emission than building a Honda Accord. People tend to think it works out over the lifetime of the car, if the Tesla uses electricity from some reasonably modest CO2 emitting source, the car is kept a long time, nobody adjusts his behavior in response, but my impression is that it's a close call at best, and it's possible in some cases the net CO2 emission of the change is unfortunately positive.
For that matter, if you consider switching *everybody* in the US to electric cars, and expanding the electricity generation and transmission infrastructure by 40% -- wow, that capital cost in "carbon" is staggering, and the payback period (meaning when you reach net negative "carbon") would probably be decades.
I wouldn't expect you to add some more dimensions to your chart, because of the lack of 3D holographic monitors among your readership, but I feel these are valuable footnotes to add, just so that people consider these "background" issues, too, which can in cases dwarf any "foreground" choice.
Comparing the space tourism numbers with the Falcon 9 numbers, I am pretty sure the space tourism numbers are for an orbital flight, not suborbital.
Hey Scott, I see no other way to contact you in general so I guess I should use a comment. Under what license can your posts (or their content) be used by third parties? Old blog as said here (https://slatestarcodex.com/about/) was under CC BY 4.0 - is that still the case? Is there a difference in paid/free posts? What about images like the blog icon or your avatar? I don't have any particular use in mind right now, so if license depends on the use, that'd be good to know too. Thanks in advance.
Sometimes I wonder how better city planning that would incentivize more bycicle use could have an impact on climate and health. Especially American cities seem poorly planned. This YouTuber really opened my eyes to this:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ORzNZUeUHAM
I wish there was microcovid.org but for carbon.
There seems to be an obvious discrepancy between "Fly on a 747 LA → NYC" and "Send a 747 LA → NYC". The emission ratio implies 180 passengers, while the cost ratio implies 1079 passengers, resulting in a 6-fold difference in "% cost". There could be some difference based on how the costs are calculated, or perhaps if the airliner hauls some cargo for money in addition to the passengers and their luggage, but not this much.
Amazon forest is the only one left ? I know Californians are burning what they have left, for example, but I always consider waaay too political to just pinpoint Amazon as the only one that matters for the world.
> It’s because I’m less responsible [...] they’re probably mostly order-of-magnitude correct, and I believe having probably mostly order-of-magnitude correct estimates is better than having no estimates at all.
We should just popularize measuring CO2 emissions in dB.
Because I am in incurable smartarse, while I appreciated the differentiation between "Amazon (the rainforest)" and "Amazon (the company)", I at once thought "but what about 'Amazon (the queen Hippolyta)'?"
I am rather sceptical towards the idea of offsetting fossil fuels by planting trees.
From my understanding, fossil fuels are very much part of the deep carbon cycle, having been removed from the biosphere for millions of years. Taking that out of the earth, burning it and then paying for someone to plant or keep a tree for (optimistically) some hundred years does not really seem sufficient here.
Of course, on a short time scale, trees might help. If the main goal is to keep the permafrost carbon in place for the next century, or just keep the sea water from rising to much until until fusion power, the second coming, or the singularity etc arrives and a long term solution is reached, trees might be worthwhile. Still, it is a band-aid at best.
What I do not know (and was unable to find quickly) is how long an additional ton of CO2 from fossil fuels will remain in the biosphere carbon cycle until the carbon ends up on the sea floor and enters the deep cycle again. There probably should be an effective half-life (more CO2 -> more plankton -> more seabed carbon)? Of course, this also assumes that the system is still in equilibrium and not in runaway mode (permafrost CO2 being released etc), so this point is probably moot.
The Climeworks approach of turning CO2 into carbonate rock seems better. While I am generally sceptical of geo-sequestration (e.g. just pumping the CO2 into underground structures and hope it happens to stay there forever) to the point of assuming it to be green-washing, carbonates such as CaCO3 are what even I would call a long-term storage, given that limestone mountains are a thing.
Naturally, as long as there are still people around irresponsible enough to burn fossil fuels for primary energy, it would probably be easier to capture the exhaust of the power plants directly instead of getting it out of the air. Still, I can see why one would not want to have a business model depending on irresponsible people.
Bus carbon lbs. depends heavily (order of magnitude difference) on the number of passengers on the bus. Any idea what average number your source uses?
On Google's carbon usage, does it count for anything that they purchase offsets with corporate earnings and claim to be carbon neutral since 2007? https://sustainability.google/commitments/#leading-at-google
Although this is an interesting academic exercise the bulk of future emission increases that would make warming a threat are from developing nations raising their standard of living and increasing their populations.
I think these type of efforts are mostly vanity exercises (not accusing this specific author of this) that willfully ignore fundamental problems. If you want to reduce global emissions then you need to make it cheap and easy for people who barely have indoor plumbing to improve their standard of living with low carbon energy.
Professionals contemplating reducing their hours of AC in SF (this is laughable from a Florida perspective) isn't a good guideline to how poor people in Africa are going to behave when their standard of living allows them to have AC. If building a local coal plant makes this half the cost of unsubsidized solar energy then they will make a very predictable decision. See Roger Pielke Jr's decade old iron law of climate policy.
The best thing we can do is use our technical ability to make the cost of low carbon energy cheaper than fossil fuels. Almost everything should be focused on this objective given how increased global emissions will evolve over time and how real world economic decisions are routinely made. Eating less cheeseburgers is a useless distraction.
Much progress has been made on making low carbon energy cheaper. The developing world needs to see choosing this power option as an obvious choice without a condescending first world climate guilt lecture. That's how we make progress.
Some quick comments:
- Cool post, agree that it's better to have somewhat inaccurate estimates than to have none. Thank you for promoting climate action!
- Emissions from anything related to electricity depend a lot on the source of that electricity, so I'm not sure how useful the averages are. If you can, it's better to use zero-carbon electricity instead of reducing electricity consumption.
- Emissions from having children are indeed very philosophically complicated. Your approach kind of makes sense, but if you heavily discount future emissions like this, it would make sense to apply the same kind of discounting in other estimates. AFAIK, most people who calculate emissions estimates for various activities don't do this so there's a bit of inconsistency. I don't really have a proposal on how to do this better. I also think that children of climate-conscious people can very well have a positive impact on climate in the future, so go figure.
- Offsets are almost as complicated as emissions from children. My wife, who advises governments on carbon markets, says that for the most part they don't work (because the reductions are not counted against a realistic baseline, there's double-counting, there's no permanence of emission reductions and a host of other problems). Climateworks and similar projects are reasonable though. The best way that we have identified so far is buying credits in a trustworthy emissions trading system like EU ETS and holding them (cancelling them will not work in the case of EU ETS because of a thing called Market Stability Reserve that will release more credits into the market if the supply is too low). There's a company that allows individual to do this: https://www.compensators.org/ -- for as long as the EU doesn't revise how the EU ETS works, this might be a good way. Even better way it to not create the emissions in the first place.
- Planting / saving trees I would see as one of the least reliable forms of offsetting, since with trees you're sending carbon into the future instead of removing it from the cycle. How far into the future is anyone's guess. There are some projects that take permanence somewhat seriously, so you need pay attention to this, if you are into offsetting via planting trees.
- My friends who did research on individual action against climate change say that the most impactful way is political action (which is high on your list). Unfortunately climate-conscious politicians often bring other problems with them (e.g. in Germany the Green Party is anti-nuclear and has some socialist policies that I don't support). I guess it's the same problem as with any other voting: hard to find parties that do no harm in addition to the good that you want them to do.
For Climeworks, do we know how much CO2 it takes to build & run their factories?
I'm sort of surprised that running a dryer is less than one cheeseburger! Since cheese is about half the emissions of beef, and I'm a vegetarian, I wonder if that means that a dryer cycle is comparable to a grilled cheese.
I'm also surprised that adjusting the thermostat by a couple degrees is already a tenth as valuable as being vegetarian!
So the global yearly carbon deficit is 0.6-40% of GDP with a geometric mean of 5% of GDP.
It was a cool Wednesday morning when I first met Jordan, a middle-aged young man from Twin Falls, Idaho. He had just finished making his shitty keurig coffee before sitting down at the dilapidated PC he built for gaming 8 years ago. As he does every morning, he began working through his morning list of news and blog posts. He noticed a new post on Astral Codex Ten and was eager to begin reading. "What could this one be about?" he asked out loud. But suddenly, his faced filled with dread and he prayed out loud: "God I really hope he doesn't fucking open with some story filled with minute and distracting details. Why does every goddamn article and blog post need to start with a long story before saying the thing they wanted to say!? In my work, this form of self-flagellation is just part of the daily grind" he told me. He began to say something else, but halted and quickly abandoned the thought. After a sigh, he followed the link to Scott's new post.
"Oh, look!" Jordan exclaimed. "Scott just starts the article by saying the thing he wanted to say. I fucking love Scott" he said while wearing the stupidest grin one could imagine. Jordan later told me that his days don't normally begin like this and that [insert transition]...
Am I the only one thinking that carbon offsets are basically useless? There's the issue Scott mentions, but I think the bigger picture is the cost of buying them means the temptation to free-ride here is enormous, so almost nobody does it. What percentage of people who consider themselves environmentalists and who are concerned about climate change have ever in their lives purchased any dollar amount of carbon offsets, much less do so regularly? I'll bet it's under 5%.
There are major omissions and fundamental problems with this analysis, and its conclusions are accordingly misguided and empty.
In sum first, substantiated below:
1/ Household consumption is brushed off as insignificant when it is actually 60% of global greenhouse gas generation, and only direct generation is considered.
2/ Wealthy households contribute disproportionately to GHG emissions, compounding our responsibility w/r/t #1.
3/ This fails to acknowledge or address consumer culture and the profligate waste it engenders.
4/ The import of the figures in the tables for individual activities & actions are grossly minimized by a/ using individual instead of population magnitudes and b/ by using discrete single usage figures instead of annual amounts.
5/ This analysis implicitly wishes for a silver bullet and denies the potential for many smaller changes to make a significant difference in aggregate.
6/ The discussion only posits absurdly hyperbolic options as the alternatives to inaction and resignation.
7/ There is, contra the framing here, abundant cause to conclude that it is more than worthwhile for individuals to invest some of their time and energy toward more conscious consumption and sustainability.
In detail:
1/ Household consumption is estimated to contribute over 60% of global greenhouse gas emissions. (1) Only ~20% is directly generated; the other 40% are generated indirectly by upstream production and trade networks. (2) The “personal activity” section ignores this entirely, considering only direct generation. This omission alone invalidates the conclusions.
2/ Compounding the above, wealthy households contribute disproportionately to GHG emissions. The US is proportional worse than the globe, and wealthier Americans are worse than their compatriots. US households with $150k annual income produce over 2x the average American household, and 4-5x low income households. (2)
Given household consumption generates 60+% of emissions globally, we can therefore conclude that American household emissions represent a disproportionate fraction of that amount. It is therefore worthwhile–necessary even–for Americans to make efforts to mitigate our household impact.
3/ Any examination of individual behaviors and their contribution to climate change that fails to address consumer culture and the profligate waste it engenders is not a serious one. Clothing is a salient example: the fashion industry is estimated (3) to generate 10% of annual global carbon emissions and 20% of global wastewater. And textiles are the largest segment of the US post-consumer waste stream. Producing a *single pair* of Levi’s 501 jeans generates 30 lbs of carbon emissions. (4)
Should we really believe that there’s no room for individual choice to affect this? Could we halve the amount of clothing we consume by choosing quality over quantity and questioning our compulsion for novelty? Should one repair a ripped pant seam instead of just buying a new pair from Old Navy for $20? Or is that “obsessing too much”?
4/ The import of the figures in the tables for individual activities & actions are grossly minimized by a/ using individual instead of population magnitudes and b/ by using discrete single usage figures instead of annual amounts.
Take driving: The table only cites a single car trip of 20 miles, but the average American drives 13,500 mi/Y (5), and there are 328M Americans. 16 lbs for a short trip certainly looks trivial, but hundreds of millions of people, each taking hundreds of such trips is huge. Indeed, cars & light trucks generated 17% of total US GHG emissions in 2018 (8,9). Using your figure of 16 lbs/20 mi driven and estimating 2/3 the population of 328M are drivers, that’s 2,400 Billion lbs of CO2/Y. There are myriad ways for an individual to reduce their personal contribution to this from alternative modes to fewer trips to modified driving style to… the list goes on.
Or air conditioning: There are about 100 million homes in the US with air conditioning. If your 2° AC savings is correct, that’s as much as 24 Billion fewer lbs CO2 emitted / year.
The decision to hide the scale effects obscures the reality that individual behaviors *in aggregate* are often major contributors, and therefore individuals do have cause (a responsibility, even) to inspect and perhaps amend their own practices.
5/ This analysis implicitly denies the potential for many smaller changes to make a significant difference in aggregate. We should not expect or seek a silver bullet solution to climate change.
6/ “all you have to do is spend 11,000 hours without air conditioning, and you'll have saved the same amount of carbon an F-35 burns on one airstrike”
Here one begins to wonder if this is all just trolling. This is an obviously false dichotomy and, as shown above, totally ignores the relative scale. 100 million homes, 2° AC adjustment -> 24 Billion fewer lbs CO2 emitted. If the US flies 10,000 F-35 sorties per yer, that’s 0.57 Billion lbs CO2.
7/ There is, contra the framing here, abundant cause to conclude that it is more than worthwhile for individuals to invest some of their time and energy toward more conscious consumption and sustainability.
The suggested actions are nothing more than a modern version of the assurance that if you just read your scripture (stay informed), say your prayers (vote), tithe on Sundays (donate to charities), and occasionally buy an indulgence (offsets), you can sleep soundly at night with the knowledge you’ll be granted passage at the pearly gates.
“You don’t need to obsess too much…or give up too many of the things you enjoy”
This is tautological and completely fails to engage the issue honestly. The question is not whether one needs to OBSESS or go full ascetic, rather it is whether one should be investing some nontrivial amount of time and effort to be more conscious about consumption and live sustainably.
The answer is yes. Yes, one should.
Refs:
1. [https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/abs/10.1111/jiec.12371]
2. [https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0160412019315752?via%3Dihub]
3. [https://www.worldbank.org/en/news/feature/2019/09/23/costo-moda-medio-ambiente]
4. [https://carboncatalogue.coclear.co/?sector=Home%20durables%2C%20textiles%2C%20%26%20equipment&company=Levi%20Strauss%20%26%20Co.&year=2015&sort=sector]
5. [https://www.fhwa.dot.gov/ohim/onh00/bar8.htm]
6. [https://bit.ly/3mLCKbh (EPA.gov)]
7. [https://www.eia.gov/todayinenergy/detail.php?id=30712]
8. https://www.epa.gov/sites/default/files/2020-04/documents/us-ghg-inventory-2020-main-text.pdf
9. [https://css.umich.edu/factsheets/carbon-footprint-factsheet]
Is there a good article that overviews carbon capture technologies or the companies that are working on it?
You guys need to read moldbugs take on climate change, it’s fake and not worth worrying about
Climeworks charges $1000 / ton? Why not grow ironwood, then barge it out into the ocean and sink it. Surely that could sequester a ton for less than a thousand bucks.
How do these costs per lb compare to those imposed by the EU's ETS and the proposed CBAM?
I realise this may have been addressed in part. But the best question is not ‘how would MY carbon reduction compare with an F14/the Us military/China?’. It’s ‘how would OUR carbon reduction compare?’. It would be helpful if you could to include some rough multiplication factors for various total populations to allow people to estimate the sum-in-aggregate. For example I’ve had a stab using the data here (https://worldpopulationreview.com/country-rankings/first-world-countries). I tried to take a middle line about the eventual outcome. Taking only the top 30 most developed countries (Norway down to Estonia) totals just over 1Bn population in 2021. Assuming that only one-third of people in those countries can be convinced, eventually, to significantly change their habits gives a multiplication factor to your ‘lifestyle’ column of roughly 340 million. If those 340m people completely decarbonise, by your figures, it would reduce carbon use by nearly 11,000 Bn lbs CO2 per year - bigger than any single emitter on the list except China. Does this not suggest the benefit of finding incentives to persuade the most receptive people to act as a collective?
I'm really looking forward to your article on how many angels can dance on the head of a pin.
If mining one bitcoin costs $38,000 does that mean that per Open Thread 166 (https://astralcodexten.substack.com/p/open-thread-166), you donated $380,000 after selling your NFT?
Does the figure for the carbon for the USA include the carbon for the US military?
If I’m not mistaken there is an error in lifestyle changes table at top of the post, it should be 2F colder all winter instead of warmer.
I'd support a pigouvian tax on carbon emissions (and all other forms of pollution) where the proceeds are given back as UBI. That's really the only policy that's needed on climate, aside from getting out of the way of private industry that wants to build nuclear/renewables. (Zoning/HOAs need to stop prohibiting solar roofs in some places).
But I strongly object to a lot of the apocalyptic rhetoric of some. Cities are thriving right now in temperatures ranging from -40C to +50C. It's absurd that humans wouldn't be able to cope with the difference between 2C and 4C globally.
This paper estimates 4434 tons of carbon offset to save one life: https://www.nature.com/articles/s41467-021-24487-w
If we assume for the sake of argument that's true, and we also use Scott's median $100/ton carbon offset cost, then it costs $434,400 to save one life through carbon offsets. That's a couple orders of magnitude worse than malaria nets.
Does anyone know of an estimation which carbon prices a given carbon cap (from an Emission Trading Scheme) entails? Or vice-versa: how a given carbon price from a carbon tax would influence emissions? this relation seems vital to me, yet I havn't seen any study on it.
More specifically, economists would have to study how a certain carbon price (from a tax or a trading scheme) influences the demand for each economic good (apples, meat, concrete, gas, electricity...). Finally, they would have to add up how much carbon is produced by the remaining consumtion. This is vitally important for answering the "social question" of how much poor people will be priced out of carbon production.
I find the idea of sequestering carbon "permanently" such a turn-off. It's not just that it's a waste of a valuable resource. There's something like a kind of a biological nihilism about it, or at the very least, a sweeping, nonchalant, ignorance about the implied risks.
Imagine we had massive permanent-sequestration capability and then, I dunno, accidentally left it running one weekend, taking global atmospheric CO2 below ~100ppm. The result would be dinosaur-extinction-astroid-impact level destructive. Except worse, because now that the carbon is inorganic and inaccessible, life is not going to just sort of... bounce back.
Obviously nobody is actually trying to scrub every last molecule from the atmosphere, but my problem is that people are starting to act as though CO2 basically nuclear waste. All downside. I reckon if you ask a bunch of 20-somethings who've been steeped in this there whole lives, "what is the ideal level of CO2", a significant fraction will say "zero".
Even if "permanent" doesn't mean "irreversible" sequestration, it seems irresponsible to be treating the carbon cycle as something that can be "shorted to ground", to use a random electrical metaphor.
It's sci-fi until it isn't. When we do develop planetary-scale sequestration capability, it seems pretty obvious we'll have to treat it like a nuclear arsenal. (It's the same with most other geohacking ideas.)
I wish we could add at least one traditional bank to the list. I have friends who are into bitcoin, and when someone mentions how carbon intensive BTC is, they counter that it's equivalent to the carbon use of other common ways that people invest or save their money.
The train trip LA -> New York seems way too high in cost. The train is supposed to be the most efficient way to travel after bicycle. Also, the native.eco calculator Scott linked as the source states 0.28 carbon tons for the trip.
How to Stop Global Warming
https://link.medium.com/ZHBBPwtL7ib
Awesome! I've been researching this a lot recently and have some information to share:
I recommend donating to founderspledge.com/funds/climate-change-fund instead of catf. They are a fund that transfers the money to a portfolio of non profits after thorough analysis, including catf.
I've been able to get a lot of my friends to donate, I think that with simple enough explanations it's possible to get a large portion of the western population to donate. I think most people care about climate change, but most of them don't know what to do to help. My current recommendation is donating %1 of income - It's an easy to swallow amount that allows high income individuals to offset tens of people.
My best estimate of the price of carbon offset is ~$5/ton (order of magnitude), when donating to founders pledge. In their 2018 research founders pledge estimates that for catf it's 0.1-1$/ton. The greenclimate.fund claim they abated approximately 1.8 billion tons with 8.9 billion dollars of funding - that's $5/ton. I assume they are less effective than catf, and that also they might have exaggerated the carbon amount. Other estimates (such as those in the post) are higher than $5. I remember vaguely that investing in solar is about $20-30/ton, if it's important to someone I'll find the source.
The fundamental assumption that "people existing is bad for the climate" is not just wrong; it's completely backwards.
Everything good that our civilization will ever create in the future, including climate change solutions, will be created by people. And to create good things, people need resources. The fewer children we (as a civilization) have, the fewer people there will be to create things. And, just as importantly, the less economic growth there will be to provide resources for that creation.
The fewer children we have, the less likely we are to ever solve ANY major problem, of which climate change is just one (looking at you, asteroids). And that's not just because a small number of children might grow up to individually do import things for the climate, a la Elon Musk; Tesla could never have succeeded without solid and affordable access to raw materials, supply chains, investors, talent pools, capital, customers, business services, contractors, etc. (And in fact, think how much more effective Tesla, and maybe a non-existent competitor or two, could be right now if the economy were much bigger, giving them access to much superior resources).
More children = more chances for an hypothetical future-problem-solver to be born. But far more relevant and less wishy-washy is: more children = more economic growth = more resources for the many not-hypothetical-problem-solvers to utilize.
Solving climate change will require a lot of new knowledge and new technology. It will also require the expenditure of a huge amount of wealth. The more wealth we have to spare, the better the odds are that we'll be willing to spend some of it on this problem.
Greatly increasing immigration from developing countries to developed ones would help in the same way; by migrating, people gain better access to resources, which makes them more productive. And there are also plenty of humanitarian reasons to support more migration. This is often used as a counter-argument to having more children, saying that we should favor immigration instead. Let's put aside the fact that this makes no sense in its own terms, given that migrating to the developed world increases a person's carbon footprint more-or-less in proportion to how much it increases their productivity. But increasing immigration and increasing birth rate have basically nothing to do with each other, and there's no reason why favoring one would imply not favoring the other. I think we should favor both.
Just as an addendum: the only reason to care about climate change at all is because it will negatively affect humans (even if the most apocalyptic predictions all came true and humanity was wiped out, there's no universe in which the biosphere itself would fail to recover). So really our choices are: have more kids, and solve climate change; or stop having kids, and don't fucking bother.
One number really impressed me, and it must be kind of a blind spot that nobody here addressed it here by now:
Assuming these numbers are correct, the US military is responsible for 1/4 of all US emissions. 3 times the UK. This is just insane.
This means for me that every politician (or even person) who worries about climate change but does not call for a substantial reduction of the US-Military can not be taken serious.
To produce one ton of anything in one year, someone or something would have to produce more than six pounds in every second in that year. (There are 31,556,952 seconds in one Gregorian year. There are 2,000 pounds in one ton. 31,556,952 seconds divided by 2,000 pounds equals 6.337 pounds per seconds. How much would a bull have to weigh to produce to produce that much fecal matter every second it is alive?