This is the second article in a series.
I committed to writing about climate change, and I’ve been lax about that, so there’s one thing. Spreading the word is important, y’all.
Recently I shared this article on Facebook. The basic message here is simple: We need massive, immediate, broad social changes in order to ensure that we don’t inadvertently drive ourselves into a wall at high speed. I figured it would be good to look at how to do that as an individual.
The first thing you need to understand if you want to start some changes in your own life is how your carbon footprint breaks down. I recommend looking at the chart in this article.
A more nuanced discussion of that chart is available here, because the contention about having children is very problematic (though not completely wrong!). In particular, the contention that having a child (and that child’s children, and so on) contributes X tons of carbon is necessarily predicated on assumptions about the carbon footprint of those descendants, and a big part of the exercise here is to bring the footprint of those descendants down radically to begin with.
So the big things there (ignoring kids) are focused on how you travel and how you eat. Since we’re in Canada, I’m gonna add in at least one more critical factor: How you keep yourself warm most of the year. The basic logic will apply for warmer areas, except you’ll aim to keep yourself cool. The same techniques will work for both.
Starting with travel, the advice to travel less often is pretty easy to follow. Just don’t go! For many of us, that’s just how life is anyway, but I’d like to highlight this figure from the Vox article I linked above:
When they talk about the 10%? That’s largely us, the G7 countries – Canada, America, the UK, France, Germany, Italy, and Japan. Having said that, richness is by definition not evenly distributed, and you can see that in this other Oxfam chart from the same article:
When people talk about taxing the rich to save the planet, this is what they’re talking about. You can bet that if you stratify those divisions further, many of them will only get more extreme the deeper you go – the top 1% of the top 1% are going to be crazy intense emitters. We need to get them off their private jets and onto passenger trains, or at least Skype calls. And the rest of us can probably just take our intercontinental vacations slightly less often.
After travel comes daily transportation, and here we get into a bunch of hard questions, so I’m going to save that for later. Let’s move on to plant-based diets.
The article that really opened my eyes about diets is this one at the Guardian. In particular, this graphic really tells the tale:
What that says to me is that you can get rid of beef, lamb, dairy, and whatever crustaceans you’re farming (I’m not in a part of the world that farms crustaceans, so forgive me if I can’t speak to that) and have a massive impact.
You might wonder why beef is so incredibly bad here. The big reason is that we don’t feed cows from pastures or plant waste (we do this with pigs, which is why pork is relatively better), because that wouldn’t even vaguely meet the demand in the world. This is part of “intensive agriculture” – we use a lot of petroleum to farm plants, and then we feed a lot of food-grade plant matter to cattle, which is just a grossly inefficient way to do things. Far better to just eat the plant matter ourselves, and far better again to farm less intensively in the bargain, since we either don’t have to grow crops to feed to animals (saving energy) or we give them the portions we can’t eat ourselves (again, saving energy).
You can see in the above chart, however, that even the most lightweight animal-derived food sources, such as eggs, are just barely competitive with foods like nuts and pulses, which are relatively expensive to farm as plants go. The next time someone responds to the idea of switching off of meat with a rant about almonds and soy beans, feel free to show them the above image. If that doesn’t give them pause, nothing will.
I’m not going to switch in a day, and nobody expects anyone else to do that either. We can choose beef and less often, limit our dairy intake, and slowly transition as far down this chart as we can manage. While we’re at it, we can encourage friends and family to do the same by talking about our reasons for doing it and our experiences on that journey. Include both the good ones and the bad; the people you know probably like the same things you do, which means the discoveries you make in both directions will ease their own transitions when and if they take the plunge.
Let me give a concrete example from my own life.
I’m having a hard time getting enough protein in my diet. The obvious answer is to eat more meat or at least more eggs. If I want to move away from those, I have to figure out what foods will get me there. I bought a book a while back called Spilling the Beans, a cookbook focused on adding protein-rich plants into your diet. I don’t love the actual recipes in the book, but I was interested in the way they discuss plant proteins. It taught me that there’s a need to eat both grains and beans in order to completely replace the protein we get from meat. Apparently the amino acids in beans or grains are, by and large, not sufficient on their own to support our health. Beans and grains together, however, should be able to fully satisfy our nutritional needs.
I’m still looking for good bean recipes, and my fiance needs to eat gluten-free, so I’ve accepted that adding these things to my diet will take a while. But it’s something I need to work on, and in fact just today I learned something new and important. I compared soy milk to almond and cashew milk, both of which have been recommended as dairy alternatives. Soy beats nut milk for protein content 7-to-1! It tastes terrible, but I can work on that, and I definitely can’t do a 1-for-1 swap of dairy for nut milk anyway.
(By the way, there’s one important exception to that rule about combining grains and beans: quinoa. I haven’t loved anything I’ve had with quinoa in it, but it is definitely on my list of foods to experiment with in the next year or so.)
Ok, so that’s diet. Let’s get back to transportation. There are a lot of things to consider when you’re looking at how to transport yourself around. The European Environment Agency has an extremely good breakdown of how this works:
More passengers and more efficient modes of transportation are our watchwords here. So let’s talk through that equation for individuals.
First of all, as with anything, the best carbon footprint is no footprint at all – can you operate professionally from home? That’s a huge carbon, money, and time saver all in one go! If you manage people, consider offering them partial or full-time work-from-home options and even offering a “home office” allowance to make the whole experience better.
Sadly, most of us can’t work from home most of the time. And conversely, we can’t just pull up stakes and move our homes to where we work. We have to transport ourselves around our neighbourhood, or our city, or our region, or even further afield. The next best thing is low-carbon transportation – can you walk or bike where you need to go? Do that. It’ll be good exercise to boot, so that can balance out some of the extra time required to hoof (or wheel) it.
If you can’t walk or bike, the next best thing is public transit. Not only are these systems spreading their carbon footprint over the total number of riders, but “medium-duty” fleet vehicles like buses can be replaced with more efficient versions on a regular basis, and we’re already seeing lower-carbon options – natural gas, hybrid-electric, and even fully electric – for these vehicles. If you’re an engaged citizen, you can try to encourage your local transit organizations to make those substitutions sooner rather than later.
Finally, if you can’t dump the car, you can dump the gas. An electric vehicle – or, more realistically in Canada’s more rural areas, a plugin hybrid-electric vehicle – can offer a significant reduction in the carbon footprint for moving you from place to place.
Aside from the direct savings on fueling these vehicles, there’s an important longer-term impact: electrification lets us slow the extraction and refining of fossil fuels. While power plants still often burn fossil fuels to turn turbines, they are, as a rule, more efficient than hundreds of smaller, variable-rate motors. More importantly, they can be phased out as we introduce new solar, wind, hydro, and, yes, nuclear options.
(We’ll talk about nuclear another day. Suffice to say we should really think about building one more generation of fission plants.)
Finally, let’s look at energy efficiency at home. NRCan offers plenty of advice about how to make your home as efficient as possible, including this nifty summary graphic:
Any home inspector will tell you that the best bang for your buck in terms of heating (and cooling) your home is to ensure that you have it well-insulated, particularly in the attic. One major study from the UK, the Kirklees Warm Zone, provided the following summary of impacts in its final report:
Those are HUGE impacts – the 700% Return on Investment is amazing, and the social benefits are some very nice icing on the cake.
When you’re insulating, don’t just think about the stuff in your walls and ceilings; apply new sealing (weather strips and caulking work well) to your windows and doors that aren’t holding heat in, or if it’s reasonable you could replace them entirely. And If you’re doing windows anyway, you should consider wrapping and sealing your entire home in Tyvek or another air barrier.
The gold standard for a while now has been the German Passivhaus design approach, where your house leaks so little air that you literally have to build in a ventilation system so that you don’t accidentally asphyxiate. And if you’re installing a ventilation system in Canada, it should be a Heat-Recovering Ventilation system, which will “transfer” the heat from the air that leaves your house to the air that comes into your house. It’s not perfect, but it’s incredibly efficient all the same.
Once you’ve upgraded the “envelope”, as the cool kids call it, of your home, it’s time to look at how you actually generate heat. My favourite resource for this was on the NRCan website, but it’s gone right now. Luckily the Wayback Machine can help us:
These numbers are getting long in the tooth now, and we have much more efficient air-source heat pumps for low-temperature conditions these days. If you’re upgrading your furnace anyway, there’s a lot to be said for installing a heat pump.
Having said all of that, there’s limited value in dumping relatively new cars or heating systems in favour of a lower-carbon option. I may write a more extensive article specifically on manufacturing footprint at a later time. For now, just keep in mind that the carbon cost of manufacturing is far from zero, and the lifetime footprint of a car or heating system factors that in. Instead, whenever you’re think about replacement, take the time to look around for lower-impact options.
Hopefully all of that gives you plenty to think about. Making these changes is important, but it’s also difficult. That’s ok. Difficult just means it will take a bit longer to get right. We can get there.
I’ll leave you with one final note: I’ve joined the Green Party of Canada because I think they’re the folks who’ll take this seriously. If we can get more of their members into government, things will happen faster. Even just getting wider and deeper support for the party will have an impact and force politicians from the rest of the spectrum to take this problem seriously.
We have limited time to get this right, and we need ambitious leaders to make it happen. I hope you’ll lend your shoulder to the wheel.
