Category: Climate change

How many things do you think we should be concentrating on to reduce our carbon footprint? A lot or a few?

A lot, surely.

60 actions to save the world

During 2019, the Ethical Consumer magazine compiled a helpful list of 60 actions that individuals in the UK can take against climate breakdown. This list is currently being promoted in 2020 by Greenpeace, as I know from experience. During a recent e-mail exchange between me and Greenpeace’s web team – I was expressing the view that their position on stopping the development of new oil and gas fields with immediate effect is a little unrealistic, not to say potentially deadly, given how dependent our entire society is on fossil fuels – they sent me the list. Perhaps in the hope that I would stop bothering them.

The list is a collection of suggestions made by the magazine’s readers. The suggestions have not been prioritised or compared, except with regard to their popularity amongst the respondents. But this omission just leaves a void which we fill, because as readers we automatically compare listed items, even if it’s to assume without consciously realising we are doing so that they are of similar weight.

For instance, here is the second entry: carry a reusable coffee cup. This recommendation’s position in the list, number 2 out of 60, gives the impression that it is an important action, at least as important as the 58 actions listed beneath. The impression is probably unintended, but it’s subconsciously inevitable in the mind of the reader.

Now whether or not the environment is a net beneficiary whenever someone buys a reusable coffee mug is a complex question; indeed, academic articles have been written about it without reaching a firm conclusion. There are various factors to consider such as the energy and materials used in the mug’s manufacture, how and how often it’s washed up, how long it’s kept, the composition of the disposable cups that would be used instead, the manner in which disposables are disposed of, … But here is an easier thought: the impact is small, one way or the other, compared say with flying over an ocean. It’s even small compared with boiling all the water required to make all those hot drinks.

Another recommendation I came across recently is to purchase and use a bamboo toothbrush. The Independent newspaper described this example as an “easy way to have a big impact”. By way of justifying the claim, the newspaper reminded the reader of the (large) number of toothbrushes discarded by the western world each year. This is a little bit like being reminded that a dripping tap wastes several gallons of water over the course of a year. If you integrate any small act of wastefulness over billions of people, or over a significant period of time such as a year, you are likely to reach a large number. To retain a sense of perspective, we really need to measure the impact of the discarded plastic toothbrush or dripping tap against other things that we do or don’t do.

It seems to me that our enthusiasm for compiling long and unranked lists raises a couple of issues. Firstly, items of different magnitude are mixed together so that we end up in a muddle as to what matters most. Then, from this muddle emerges a temptation to pick and choose: we can ‘do our bit for the environment’ by using a bamboo toothbrush, say, which gives the green light to our travel plans, diet and shopping habits.

Green energy suppliers

One of the choices that concerned citizens make to do their bit for the environment is to choose a green energy supplier. I discussed this option in a previous post (you can search for ‘green energy supplier’ if interested), but to re-cap: hitherto, the amount of renewable electricity in the UK has been largely determined not by concerned consumers but by the overall size of the various subsidy mechanisms: the Renewables Obligation, Contracts for Difference, and (for smaller schemes) Feed-in Tariffs.

As of 2019, the last complete calendar year, circa 37% of our annual electricity consumption is generated from renewable sources. How much would be from renewables if no households had deliberately chosen to sign up with a green supplier over the last couple of decades? Close to 37%, I reckon. It is difficult for end consumers to affect the total amount of renewable energy unless they are willing to pay significantly more than the market rate for their energy, and the extra funds find their way to the developers. There has been an increase in public support for renewable energy – and this might have had some unmeasurable impact on government targets, or R&D, or the commercial rates of return sought by developers – but for the most part ‘green’ suppliers have displaced ‘brown’ suppliers without actually affecting the overall generation mix in aggregate; and real power projects that have secured subsidies and gone ahead have displaced other potential renewable projects that might have been built otherwise.

For the avoidance of doubt, I think it is a good idea to buy energy either from a ‘green supplier’ or on a green tariff from a ‘brown supplier’. (Most suppliers are of a shade in between these two colours.) I also think that consumer impact will be much greater in the future than it has been in the past, essentially because new renewable projects are much closer to being viable without any subsidy and hence sensitive to other influences. But it is obvious from an analysis of materiality that far from such action being sufficient in terms of ‘doing one’s bit’, it does not come close to the handful of big ticket items.

5 actions to save the world (barring miracles)

Which are these:

1) Eat a largely plant-based diet. 2) Travel less in cars and planes, be it for business or pleasure. 3) Cut down on buying stuff. 4) Reduce home heating by living with others, or downsizing, or insulating, or only heating certain rooms, or turning down the thermostat, or installing a heat pump. 5) Don’t spend too many hours data streaming (e.g. Netflix). (And perhaps one should add: 6) Don’t have lots of children.)

Admittedly the bamboo toothbrush, not to mention most of the 60 actions in Ethical Consumer’s survey, sounds more appealing than these rather brutal options – at least to those of us who imagine happiness is obtained from consumption in its various manifestations. The trouble is that nature cannot be fooled (Feynman’s words, not mine). Politicians would have us believe that science will come to the rescue – but climate scientists and organisations like the IPCC are less persuaded of the wisdom of this and largely repeat the points made in the previous paragraph (data streaming might be an exception, being a particularly recent concern). Technology, to qualify an overused phrase, is unlikely to be a silver bullet.

Speaking of politicians, there is a widespread viewpoint that personal action is pointless as we are individually insignificant compared with the sheer might of oil companies, or other multinationals, or governments. But those of us who hold this viewpoint are perhaps confusing the consequences for us as individuals with the mechanism by which those consequences are visited upon us. Whether from government regulation, market pricing, or our unprompted volition, change is in store for our way of life – if we are to avoid catastrophe.

Unless, that is, there’s a scientific miracle or two, or climate science turns out to be vastly mistaken.

“The UK’s fixed term parliaments could see politicians failing to prioritise climate change, veteran naturalist Sir David Attenborough has suggested,” BBC news report, 26 January 2020

Politicians and decision makers focus on current accounts: income and expenditure over a recent period such as the last year. Not capital accounts. We see it in the behaviour of traders and investors; in the government’s obsession with the national deficit (around £40 billion in 2018/19 according to the Office of National Statistics) instead of the national debt (around £2000 billion, or fifty times as much); and in the public dialogue on climate breakdown.

Current account thinking. I don’t know whether fixed term parliaments are to blame, but it is everywhere.

Take, for instance, government data on our greenhouse gas emissions. The headline number for the UK, as published by BEIS and consistent with the Climate Change Act, is under 500 MtCO2e for 2018. If you rummage around, you can find on the ONS website no fewer than five different measures of our national emissions. The government quotes the lowest number naturally, which omits imported emissions, international shipping and aviation, and has favourable assumptions regarding biomass and crown territories. Arguably the most honest of the measures, called ‘Footprint’, is close to 800 MtCO2e, with most of the difference vis-à-vis the CCA number explained by the emissions embodied in imported goods.

And yet, even the Footprint is on a current account basis in two ways. Firstly, and obviously, it is an annual figure. The trouble with annual figures is that CO2 accumulates in the atmosphere, just as debt accumulates, though unlike debt it can never be written off in extremis. So arguably we should be looking at cumulative emissions over a period of time, say the period of 140 years since Thomas Edison invented his lightbulb. This can be done – and it shows the United Kingdom in second place, behind the United States in first place, in terms of overall greenhouse damage done per head of population by each of the nations on earth. Perhaps this isn’t too surprising given that Britain started the Industrial Revolution – and perhaps we shouldn’t be held accountable for the lives of our forebears – but it is nonetheless startling, especially to anyone who has been exposed to government statistics and China-bashing.

Current account thinking goes beyond government and infects independent bodies such as the Committee on Climate Change. In their technical report published in May 2019, the CCC comment on the importance of avoiding carbon leakage in the future. The irony is that their starting point, 503 MtCO2e in 2017, is on a production basis that ignores (or, rather, sets to zero) all of the carbon leakage that had already occurred up to that point from closure of British manufacturing industry and consequent reliance on imports. It’s a little bit like hosting a party and at some point in the evening – after most people have left – announcing that you’ve thought of a good game to stop people from going. And the unfortunate corollary of the CCC’s definition of ‘net zero’, combined with the latest scientific assessment of what is genuinely sustainable, is that we could hit our target in 2050 and still be living unsustainably unless the exporting nations make substantial reductions themselves to help us out.

Current account thinking also affects individual attitudes, in particular to ‘green purchases’. As an example, some of us are under the impression that buying a new electric vehicle is good for the environment. Of course it’s bad for the environment due to the emissions embodied in its manufacture, especially of the battery. Whether it’s worse than persisting with an existing petrol vehicle depends on the carbon intensity of electricity, future usage, ongoing maintenance and relative efficiency; but as a rule of thumb a new EV, unless it’s an essential replacement, has a ‘payback period’ of a few years, or longer if you buy a Tesla.

It would help us all if a system of labelling could be developed to provide a systematic measure of the trade-off between embodied emissions and ongoing emission savings for something like a new electric vehicle.

Diet and Neolithic Britain

Further up, I mentioned that there are two ways in which the ONS Footprint is on a current account basis. The second of these is more complex: none of the ONS measures take account of land opportunity costs. Which, according to a number of recent studies, are enormous.

Focussing on the UK, 70% (roughly) of our land surface is used for agriculture; and 50%, i.e. half of our land surface, is pasture and grassland for sheep and cattle. By comparison, all of our cities, towns and villages, houses and roads, take up less than 10% in aggregate.

Recently, the BBC published a short video of land changes since William the Conqueror. Apparently in 1066 the proportion of our country that was wooded was similar to today (15% then, 13% now). The implication is that somehow it is ‘natural’ for Britain to be largely grassland; and indeed that is what many of us think (and farmers argue). But this just shows how long the human footprint has been stamped on both the country and our collective imagination. We have to go back to Neolithic times to discover a land that was mostly woodland, before the introduction of agriculture. And what was true then is still true today: the truly natural state of Britain – in the sense of what it would look like if human beings hadn’t changed its appearance, and would return to if we let it – is a land covered (mainly) by trees.

What happened in Britain in the mists of time has been happening more recently in other parts of the world: forest, including rainforest, is being removed in order to create space for human animals. Globally, 40% of the Earth’s land area is now devoted to livestock. Given the (very) low energy efficiency and nutritional efficiency of eating animals that eat plants, it has been estimated by Joseph Poore and his colleagues at Oxford University in 2018, and by Searchinger et al at Princeton, that if we were to largely eliminate consumption of meat and dairy, and rewild the reclaimed land, humanity could change the earth’s appearance from space. Or, rather, reverse the change in appearance that has been taking place in recent centuries and decades. Poore estimates we could reclaim an area the size of the United States, Europe, Australia and China combined.

On the other hand, if we don’t change our diet, and the preponderance of the world’s population that lives in Asia ‘catches up’ with western diets, then we will have to denude the planet further to the point where it is debatable whether we will be able to feed ourselves, quite apart from bringing on catastrophic global heating.

In the CCC’s report from May 2019, agriculture is identified as contributing 9% of the UK’s greenhouse gas emissions. This is based on the ‘status quo’, i.e. on the national usage of land to which we’ve been accustomed since before William the Conqueror. It is current account thinking, because it accepts the status quo of land use and ignores the potential to rewild a large chunk of Britain in an optimal manner. In the same way traditional statistics, that suggest agriculture globally accounts for around 25% of greenhouse emissions, bear the signs of current account thinking: they do not quantify optimal land use (optimal from the perspective of the climate); if they did, then agriculture would appear to be as important as energy consumption.

The impact of current account thinking is most striking with respect to diet, but is evident also in the whole energy debate. To move away from it requires imagination, an ability to think ‘outside the box’ and not be blinkered by the status quo. Whether we as individuals, and our politicians, can manage such a thought transition is questionable, but it’s no exaggeration to suggest that our survival is dependent upon it.