By Isaiah Ritzmann
Published in September 2020
We now have less than a decade to avoid catastrophic climate change. As has become common knowledge, the International Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) has warned that to keep average global warming below 1.5 degrees humanity needs to cut our carbon emissions by 50% by 2030. This is a tall order. To do this requires a deep transformation of our whole society and of ourselves. A happy accident of our collective COVID experience is that many of the behaviours that we need to adopt in order to lower our carbon footprints have already been adopted, at least in part and at least temporarily. In my article “The New Normal” I listed some of the new ways of living that COVID has bequeathed to us. Commuting to work and flying have dropped dramatically as people work from home, rediscovering a life rooted in place. During the summer, the desire to be outside has encouraged more and more people to bike; so much so that some bike shops have sold out of bikes, others have been overwhelmed by new business. Our relationship to food is also changing. In the past six months more and more food has been grown in backyard or community gardens. Greenhouses have been sold out of seedlings and many community-shared agriculture programs have doubled their business. Can we read the signs of the times?
We should be optimistic here, but in moderation. In early September the UN Environmental Program warned the world: “Climate change has not stopped for COVID-19. Greenhouse gas concentrations in the atmosphere are at record levels and continue to increase. Emissions are heading in the direction of pre-pandemic levels following a temporary decline caused by the lockdown and economic shutdown. The world is set to see its warmest five years on record – in a trend which is likely to continue – and is not on track to meet agreed targets to keep global temperature increase well below 2°C or at 1.5 °C above pre-industrial levels.”
In other words, returning to the old normal is as dangerous as some people have been saying. The possibilities of a new normal that COVID gave to us need to be sustained and built upon. These possibilities were the first steps but we need to go further. Part of going further is imagining exactly what further looks like. As the late Grace Lee Boggs often said “People are aware that they cannot continue in the same way but are immobilized because they cannot imagine an alternative.” What could this alternative look like? What would it mean concretely, for us as individuals and as a society, to transition to much lower carbon footprints in a short-period of time?
Four Main Sources of Carbon Emissions
Average household carbon footprints in Canada and the United States come from four main sources: our cars, our homes, our stuff, and our food. These four domains are responsible for the bulk of our carbon footprints. About 30% of our emissions come from transportation which is mainly driving, but also flying. Another approximately 30% come from home energy use, especially heating in the winter and cooling in the summer. Another 25% comes from the stuff we buy, all the consumer goods we collect and the carbon emissions associated with their production and disposal. Finally about 15% comes from the food we eat, especially from red meat and other high-on-the-food-chain type consumption. If we really want to lower our emissions we have to think creatively and seriously about lowering our footprints in these four areas. The more we can imagine what this looks like, the more it becomes possible.
Transportation
Transportation remains a major source of emissions. While emissions may account for about 30% over average, household carbon emissions, according to Climate Action Waterloo Region transportation counts for 49% of all carbon emissions in our area. This year COVID has pointed a way forward. Not driving by working from home, not flying by vacationing in place, and rediscovering the joy of biking are all significant steps forward. What else can we do to drive and fly less? While electric vehicles are promising there are significant doubts (due to other environmental limits like lithium supply and the intermittency of green energy) that they can be taken to scale to replace our current vehicle fleet, let alone growing, global demand. As an alternative we will need to learn to walk, bike, take public transportation, and carpool more. Government policy and infrastructure spending can help with that. In the past decade progressive policy in our Region has redesigned public transportation around the ION and has helped create dozens of new bike lanes. Carpooling networks and networking technology exists. Various bikeshare programs are popping up, as are community bike shops like Recycle Cycles where people can learn to fix and maintain their bikes.
While there is more that can be done on government levels to lower transportation related emissions, including carbon taxes, there is also a lot to be done on a personal and cultural level. We are a car culture, partly for the love of it. In the United States people talk about the 30-40-50 trip distance rule. That is to say in the United States (like Canada), statistically speaking, 30 percent of car trips are a mile or shorter, 40 percent are two miles or shorter, and 50 percent are three miles or shorter. To put it another way half of all car trips are the equivalent of 15 minute bike rides. In order to get to a new normal when it comes to getting around, we need to question what has become “normal” when it comes to our cars. What drives our driving? Is there another way?
Home Energy Use
Another 30% of our overall emissions comes from home energy use, and in particular how we heat and cool our homes in the winter and summer. The energy it takes to heat our homes in the winter comes from either natural-gas burning furnaces or through electricity (which, in Ontario, is less carbon-intensive than other places). Likewise in the summer a major way of cooling our homes is through air-conditioning, an energy consumer in both production and use. On a personal level we can reduce our energy usage in both winter and summer in multiple ways. In the winters we can keep the temperature lower by wearing sweaters inside. In the summer we can use blinds, and fans, and other low-tech ways of keeping cool. When we can afford it we can purchase more efficient technologies, like better air conditioners. But beware of the Jevon’s paradox. Historically greater efficiency in technology has not meant lower energy use – instead it has meant the opposite. People often will “spend” more energy than they have “saved.” According to Stanley Cox, energy analyst from the Land Institute, between 1993 and 2005 the energy efficiency of air conditioners improved by nearly 30%. In the same time period energy consumption by AC rose nearly 40%. We need both new technology and new habits.
A major area of overall emission and energy waste comes from air leakages; because of poor insulation, space around windows and doors, ducts, plumbing holes, etc. On average air leaks squander 15-25% of heat in the winter and account for the same amount of heat home’s pick up in the summer. The need to retro-fit homes for an energy efficient future is clear, and great work has already been started on this and advocated for by local groups like REEP green solutions. A massive retro-fit project is also a key pillar of various versions of the Green New Deal. A massive jobs program that would hire hundreds of thousands of people to retro-fit homes meets both short-term economic and long-term environmental needs. Such a project is beyond the scale and ability of individuals or neighbourhoods – it needs and requires government intervention. Will the government take on the role of leadership in this area, as history and hope are asking?
Consumer Goods
The third major source of household carbon emissions is the stuff we buy, counting for about a quarter of our overall footprint. Everything we buy – ranging from clothing and furniture to washing machines and electronic gadgets – comes at a carbon cost. There are embedded emissions each stage in the life cycle of our stuff from mining the raw materials, to manufacturing, transportation, and finally the waste disposal. We don’t see these emissions but they are very much there. C40 cities – a global association of 96 of the world’s largest cities, trying to tackle climate change – released a study in 2018 that suggested that municipal emissions are about 60% higher than most city planners estimate if we factor in items that people buy that are made outside city limits. This dynamic exists on the national level as well. The UK, for example, reported that between 1990 and 2004 they had a 6% decline in annual carbon emissions. When these numbers include “imported emissions” – overseas emissions from imported goods – a 6% decrease becomes an 11% increase instead. The large carbon footprint doesn’t just come from the hidden emissions in the before-and-after story of the stuff we buy. The large carbon footprint comes from the sheer amount of things we buy, our own excessiveness. Those of us in the middle classes or higher have more clothing, furniture, & gadgets than we can count. As a startling example consider that less that half of our used clothing is donated to thrift stores and thrift stores get so much clothing they can at best only sell half of them, if that. How much of the world’s carbon emissions come from buying clothes we don’t need that then end up in landfills shortly after?
If buying so many things is so dangerous, why do we keep on doing it? In part because it is normal. Everybody’s doing it, it must not be that bad. Part of the work of reducing our global emissions by 50% by 2030 will be challenging consumer culture. We must make the weirdness of simple living the new normal, as well as gently but firmly challenge our own bad habits. Aside from individual change we also need system change. As both studies and intuition have shown, the nature of paid work and the hours we spend at it contribute systematically to our culture of consumption. The lack of freedom and meaning at work, combined with related stress, leads people to overcompensate through binge-watching TV and so-called “retail therapy.” Meanwhile we spend so much of our lives at work we have less time for meaningful relationships with friends, family, and our wider community. In response we try to substitute consumption for community – which, of course, doesn’t work. If we are going to challenge the reign of consumerism over our culture we need to change the structures of work and work-time. A Green New Deal package could call for Work-Time Reduction, a set of policies that would include more vacation time and moving from a five-day to a four-day work week. Juliet Schor, economist from Boston College, has studied the relationship between work time and ecological impact in both North America and Western Europe. She has shown that a reduction in work-time of about 20% is correlated with about a 30% reduction of carbon emissions. This is because people who have more time drive less & shop less, they use their time abundance to live a more meaningful life rooted in community which in turn gives them more ability to resist the drudgeries of consumer living.
Food & Diets
The final main source of our carbon emissions come from the food we eat, especially red meat. Even though driving, heating, cooling, and buying are disproportionately greater emitters, climate vegetarianism has become the most popular and “viral” of the new normal of climate-conscious behaviours. According to a recent IPSOS study in the past 15 years over 10 million Americans have adopted a plant-based diet. Beef, dairy, & cheese top the list of highest emitters, but even here there is a range of better or worse options. In places like Brazil massive deforestation is taking place to expand cattle ranches, mostly to feed growing demand for beef worldwide. On the other hand, there are some places in the world where management practices such as rotational grazing means that beef, while not carbon neutral, is emitting far less per kilogram than consumed. Even before climate change became a recognized problem in the 1980s the early environmental movement urged a change in diet to accommodate a growing population within an abundant but limited global ecology. Frances Moore Lappe’s Diet for A Small Planet (1971) argued that the earth could produce enough for everyone but when so much land was set aside to feed animals for those rich enough to eat meat there was less land left aside to grow vegetables and grains for the hungry. Food, early environmentalists pointed out, proved Gandhi’s point that “the earth provides for everyone’s needs, but not for everyone’s greed.”
Making Choices
The path to living lightly on the earth may be a long one, and may be difficult, but it doesn’t have to be complex and confusing. Once we realize the four main sources of our carbon footprint are our cars, our homes, our stuff, and our food, we can begin to make choices in all these areas that lets us become more and more part of the solution. At the same time we can raise our voices together, asking governments for bolder climate action that supports all of us by building better public transportation infrastructures, more bike lanes, a public works program for retro-fitting housing, more time off work, and strong support for local food systems. A sustainable future is still possible. The more we can imagine concrete steps we can take towards it, both individually and as a society, the more possible it becomes. Yet a sustainable future is not inevitable and won’t always be possible. We need to act, we need to act collectively, and we need to act now. Never in history will our collective choices mean as much as they will in the next ten years.
