Tagged “carbon”

So many smallish bits it seems hard to make a dent in this. Also troublesome is the difficuly of measuring.

Still curious of how to estimate or measure the impact of things like switching to EVs - what is increase on existing residential power use, determining emissions from that. There are other benefits of it, like improving neighbourhood air quality, but there isn't a zero-cost switch. Land use for different energy types is another one.
Also interested in some macro estimates of energy requirements per day (i.e. 9MJ of food, production and travel costs of that alone).

Excellent Ezra episode with Jesse Jenkins touched on a lot of the questions I had about this.

On effective environmentalism. I wonder if carbon is an oversimlified metric and we are ignoring too many other factors, like ground/water pollution, or animal welfare in farming operations optimizing for high-efficiency.

They found that some reusable alternatives never manage to reach that break-even point because of the energy and water used each time a reusable item is washed.
...
On the positive side of the ledger for reusables, nine of the 12 reusables were able to reach the break-even point, even when washed after every use.

I am probably still mad about all the straws hype.

For example, reusable bamboo drinking straws and two reusable sandwich storage options — beeswax wrap and silicone bags — never reached the break-even point in any of the three environmental impact categories assessed in the study: energy use, global warming potential, and water consumption.

Either infuriating or upsetting how long we have known about this and done nothing.

HN discussion, including some good comments like this:

The time for decisive action was at least a decade ago, but there's no harm in starting now — it just means that the transition to alternative energy sources must be more abrupt and more investment must be allocated to remedial technologies that can work towards undoing at least some portion of the damage we have done to our biosphere.

Let historians and the next generations worry about whose fault it was. It is more important to secure for the next generation a sustainable and habitable future, than it is to look back at past hubris and wonder where it went wrong.