Climate Brief: What's your carbon footprint?

Introduction

We at Climate Brief write about the present and future impacts of global warming around the world; our diary entries often sound like dirges from a requiem for our planet. Often there is no content that tells us what actions can be taken to reduce our greenhouse gas contributions to the atmosphere.

I thought it would be good to write an action diary on reducing global warming; that is, what we each can do to reduce our impact as individuals. The best metric for determining this is the “carbon footprint”. While most of us are familiar with the term, we may not be as familiar with how it is applied to individuals, what the relative impact of typical individual activities might be, and how we can change how we live to reduce our carbon footprint.

What is a carbon footprint?

The definition according to Wikipedia:

A carbonfootprint is the total greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions caused by an individual, event, organization, service, place or product, expressed as carbon dioxide equivalent.

A carbon footprint can be measured on the micro- to global scale, and is expressed as the metric ton equivalent of CO₂ produced by an individual/event/organization/etc.

Many activities result in an implicit release of greenhouse gas which must be accounted for to determine an inclusive footprint. These include an individual’s diet (meat versus vegan), transportation choices, housing choices, and so on.

Calculating a carbon footprint

Relative sizes of carbon footprints

There is a strong positive (and not in a good way) correlation between standard of living and individual, community, and national carbon foot print. The graphic below illustrates this for the year 2017.

If you look carefully, even among nations with high standards of living, there are significant differences. Here, it’s most apparent when comparing wealthy North American countries with those in Europe. As one might expect, these differences are the result of political choices of country governments. Europe has generally been more proactive in reducing its CO₂ emissions through both regulations and replacing carbon-based energy with renewables.

To add some detail, I’ve added a table of per capital CO₂ emissions for the US and Europe below, for 1990 and 2018:

Source: Wikipedia

While the US continues to be second-ranked in 2018, we have reduced CO₂ emissions by over 20% since 1990. Denmark improved three places over the period, while Sweden lowered its emissions by over 42%. Canada is top-ranked in CO₂ emissions, and showed the lowest reduction between 1990 and 2018. But because of its population, the US emits over 6 billion metric tons of CO₂, while Canada emits only 0.724 billion metric tons in 2018.

individual footprints

The annual average US carbon footprint is 29,350 metric tons per year. according to the EPA. I plugged our household numbers into the carbon footprint calculator on the EPA website to see where my husband and I stand.

We produce 19,292 pounds of CO₂ equivalent annually, about 65% of the national average. This is attributable to one of our cars being a Prius IV (orange bar), my being retired, and our choosing to use 100% renewable energy (wind and solar, green bar) for our electricity.

The impact of individual change: Another Prius

What if my husband would trade in his Volkswagen for a Prius similar to mine? The graphic below tells the story:

The result would decrease our household CO2 equivalent production to 10,683 pounds, a 45% reduction from our current level, and only 36% of the national average! The lion’s share of this reduction is from more efficient transportation.

You can use the EPA’s carbon footprint calculator to determine how to reduce your carbon footprint through changes in home energy, transportation, and recycling of waste.

Conclusion: You *can* have an impact!

It’s difficult to believe that there is anything we can do to have a positive impact on our planet, especially given recent events attributable to global warming, including fire, drought, heat, and floods. But despair is truly not an option, and taking no action will result in what we most fear; an increasingly uninhabitable planet with increasing strife as some regions change more profoundly than others.

Political

Carbon taxes/pricing

Bringing unaccounted for external costs of using carbon energy into the cost of doing business, is considered by many as the best option for controlling CO₂ emissions. While most developed countries (and some US states) have already instituted some form of carbon pricing, the US has not.

A 2019 report is available from the Congressional Research Service on consideration and potential impacts of placing a carbon tax on emissions. A diary written today by a former US EPA attorney discusses Federal carbon pricing and is prompting a debate about its relative merits.

We can as individuals or as part of larger environmental advocates lobby our representatives for legislation to address global warming, including carbon pricing. Legislation has been introduced in the Senate and the House.

Individual

The one thing we can control is our own behavior in response to the environment we inhabit. We can determine what personal and household decisions we can make to reduce our carbon footprints and mitigate global warming.

Beside the EPA carbon footprint calculation webpage, others that are available include:

1. Conservation.org
2. Carbon Footprint
3. Nature Conservancy
4. The Footprint Hero —the 7 best carbon footprint calculators of 2021

And finally — a quote on global warming and what we must do about it from the British writer Louise Burfitt-Dons:

Global warming causing climate change may be the ultimate issue that unites us all.

May it be so.