INTRODUCTION

A few years ago I agreed to go around a supermarket with a journalist who wanted to write an article on low-carbon food. We trailed up and down the aisles with the Dictaphone running, and she plied me with questions, most of which I was pitifully unable to answer.

“What about these bananas?... How about this cheese?... It’s organic. That must be better... isn’t it?... Or is it?... Lettuce must be harmless, right?... Should we have come here by bus?... At least we didn’t fly! How big a deal is food, anyway?”

It was not at all clear what the carbon-conscious shopper should do. There was clearly a huge gap in the available consumer knowledge, and on that day we couldn’t fill it. The article never happened, and it’s probably just as well. Since then I have looked long and hard into all kinds of carbon footprints and carried out numerous studies, including one for a supermarket chain.

This book is here to answer that journalist’s questions, and many more besides. It’s not just a book about food and travel. I want to give you a sense of the carbon impact—that is, the climate change impact—of everything you do and think about. I want to give you a carbon instinct. Although I have discussed the footprint of just under one hundred items, I hope by the time you have read about these you will have gained such a sense of where carbon impacts come from that you will be able to make a reasonable guesstimate of the footprint of more or less anything and everything that you come across. It won’t be exact, but I hope you’ll at least be able to get the number of zeros right most of the time. There are messages in this book for ordinary people, some for businesses, and a few sprinkled in for policy makers too.

Some basic assumptions

I’m hoping I can take three things for granted:
• climate change is a big deal;
• it’s caused by humans,
• and we can do something about it.

However, out of respect for the still-widespread confusion over these assumptions, I have put more about them in an appendix in case you want to check them out before moving on.

Perspective

A friend recently asked me how he should best dry his hands to reduce his carbon footprint―with a paper towel or with an electric hand drier. The same person flies across the Atlantic literally dozens of times a year. A sense of scale is required here. The flying is tens of thousands of times more important than the hand drying. So my friend was simply distracting himself from the issue. I want to help you get a feel for roughly how much carbon is at stake when you make simple choices—where you travel, how you get there, whether to buy something, whether to leave the TV on standby, and so on.

Picking battles

I’m not trying to give you a list of 500 things you can do to help save the planet.1 You could probably already write that list yourself. You will find at least 500 possibilities in here, but this is a book about helping you work out where you can get the best return for your effort. This book is here to help you pick your battles. If you enjoy the read and by the end of it have thought of a few things that can improve your life while cutting a decent chunk out of your carbon, then I’ll be happy. The book isn’t here to tell you what to do or how radical to be. Those are personal decisions.

Is carbon like money?

In one sense, yes it is.

Carbon is just like money in that you can’t manage it unless you understand it, at least in broad terms. Most of the time we know how much things cost without looking at the price tag. I don’t mean that we have an exact picture, but we know that a bottle of champagne is more expensive than a cup of tea but a lot cheaper than a house. So most of us don’t buy houses on a whim. Our financial sense of proportion allows us to make good choices. If I really want champagne, I know I can have it, provided that somewhere along the line I cut out something just as expensive that is less important to me. Our carbon instinct needs to be just like the one we have for managing our money.

That’s where the similarity ends. Unlike with money, we are not used to thinking about carbon costs. It’s also much harder to tell how much we are spending because we can’t see it and it’s not written down. Furthermore, unlike what happens when we spend a lot of money, we don’t personally experience the consequences of our carbon impact because it’s spread across nearly seven billion people and many years.

Enjoy the read

These pages are written for people who want to love their lives and for whom that now entails having some carbon awareness alongside everything else that matters to them.

Dip in. Keep this book by the loo. Read it from cover to cover or flit around. Use it as a reference if you like. Talk about it. Take issue with it. Let me know how it could be improved ( ). Think of it like an early map, full of inaccuracies but better, I hope, than what you had before.

If there’s something else to be gleaned the book, it is that nearly all of us, including me, have plenty of junk in our lives that contributes nothing at all to the quality of our existence. It’s deep in our culture. Cutting that out makes everyone’s life better, especially our own. I got a big win by swapping my solo car commutes for bike rides and carpools. That works for me, but I’m not prescribing that particular solution for you, because we are all different. I hope you enjoy the read and that, while you are at it, you bump into at least something you can use.

So how bad are bananas?

As it happens, they turn out to be a fine low-carbon food, though not totally free from sustainability issues to keep an eye on.

A QUICK GUIDE TO CARBON AND CARBON FOOTPRINTS

Carbon footprint is a lovely phrase that is horribly abused.1 I want to make my definition clear at the outset.

Throughout this book, I’m using the word footprint as a metaphor for the total impact that something has.

And I’m using the word carbon as shorthand for all the different global warming greenhouse gases.

So, I’m using the term carbon footprint as shorthand to mean the best estimate that we can get of the full climate change impact of something. That something could be anything—an activity, an item, a lifestyle, a company, a country, or even the whole world.

CO2e? What’s that?

Human-caused climate change, also known as global warming, is caused by the release of certain types of gas into the atmosphere. The dominant greenhouse gas generated by humans is carbon dioxide (CO2), which is emitted whenever we burn fossil fuels in homes, factories, or power stations. But other greenhouse gases are also important. Methane (CH4), for example, which is emitted mainly by agriculture and landfill sites, is 25 times more potent per pound than carbon dioxide. Even more potent but emitted in smaller quantities are nitrous oxide (N2O), which is about 300 times more potent than carbon dioxide and released mainly from industrial processes and farming, and refrigerant gases, which are typically several thousand times more potent than carbon dioxide.

In the U.S., the total impact on the climate breaks down like this: carbon dioxide (85 percent), methane (8 percent), nitrous oxide (5 percent) and refrigerant gases (2 percent).

Given that a single item or activity can cause multiple different greenhouse gases to be emitted, each in different quantities, a carbon footprint, if written out in full, could get pretty confusing. To avoid this, the convention is to express a carbon footprint in terms of carbon dioxide equivalent (CO2e). This means the total climate change impact of all the greenhouse gases caused by an item or activity rolled into one and expressed in terms of the amount of carbon dioxide that would have the same impact.

Beware carbon toe-prints

The most common abuse of the phrase carbon footprint is to miss out some or even most of the emissions caused, whatever activity or item is being discussed. For example, many online carbon calculator websites will tell you that your carbon footprint is a certain size based purely on your home energy and personal travel habits, while ignoring all of the goods and services you purchase. Similarly, a magazine publisher might claim to have measured its carbon footprint but in doing so looked only at its office and cars while ignoring the much greater emissions caused by the printing house that produces the magazines themselves. These kinds of carbon footprints are actually more like carbon “toe-prints”—they don’t give the full picture.

Direct and indirect emissions

Much of the confusion around footprints comes down to the distinction between “direct” and “indirect” emissions. The true carbon footprint of a plastic toy, for example, includes not only direct emissions resulting from the manufacturing process and the transportation of the toy to the store; it also includes a whole host of indirect emissions, such as those caused by the extraction and processing of the oil used to make the plastic in the first place. These are just a few of the processes involved. If you think about it, tracing back all the things that have to happen to make that toy leads to an infinite number of pathways, most of which are infinitesimally small. To make the point clearly, let’s try following just one of those pathways. The staff in the offices of the plastic factory use paper clips made of steel. Within the footprint of that steel is a small allocation to take account of the maintenance of a digger in the iron mine that the steel originally came from... and so on forever. The carbon footprint of the plastic toy includes the lot, so working it out accurately is clearly no easy task!

To give another example, the true carbon footprint of driving a car includes not only the emissions that come out of the tailpipe but also all the emissions that take place when oil is extracted, shipped, refined into fuel, and transported to the gas station, not to mention the substantial emissions caused by producing and maintaining the car.

A note about high-altitude emissions

Emissions from planes in the sky are known to have a greater impact than those that would arise from burning the same amount of fuel at ground level. The science of this discrepancy is still poorly understood. Nevertheless, because our measure is setting out to be a guide to climate change impact, it is essential to try to take this into account. That is why in this book I have multiplied all aviation emissions by 1.9.4 (Some experts believe the true impact of plane emissions could be even higher and suggest a multiplier of up to 4.)

In the Further Information section you’ll find a slightly more technical discussion of the methodologies I have used to get the numbers.

The essential but impossible measure

The carbon footprint, as I have defined it, is the climate change metric that we need to be looking at. The problem is that it is also impossible to measure. We don’t stand a hope of being able to understand how the impact of our bananas compares with the impact of all the other things we might buy instead unless we have some way of taking into account the farming, the transport, the storage, and the processes that feed into those stages. A key question, then, is this: How should we deal with a situation in which the thing we need to understand is impossibly complex?

One common response is to give up and measure something easier, even if that means losing most of what you are interested in off the radar. The illusionist Derren Brown refers to one of his core techniques as the misdirection of attention: by focusing his audience on something irrelevant, he can make them miss the bit that matters. Examples include an airport waxing lyrical about the energy efficiency of its buildings without mentioning the flights themselves. The same thing can happen by accident. If you settle for a toe-print, there is a very good chance it will misdirect your attention and steer it away from the big deals.

An alternative response to the problem, and the approach that this book is all about, is to do the best job you can, despite the difficulties, of understanding the whole picture. This book is about making the most realistic estimates that are possible and practical and being honest about the uncertainty.

Blurry numbers...

First and foremost, I am trying to get the orders of magnitude clear.

In my work I put a lot of effort into developing a realistic picture of different carbon footprints using a variety of methods. This book draws upon a lot of that, as well as the most credible secondary sources that I have been able to find. However, huge uncertainty remains. So when you see a number like “2.5 kg (5.5 lbs.) CO2e” on an item such as a burger, bear in mind that it is a best estimate. What it really means is something like “best estimate of 2.5 kg (5.5. lbs.) CO2e, probably between 1.5 and 4 kg (3 and 8 lbs.) CO2e and almost certainly between 1 and 10 kg (2 and 20 lbs.).” That is the nature of all carbon footprints. Don’t let anyone tell you otherwise.

Some of the numbers you’ll see are even flakier still. This generally happens when I’m trying to bring the beginnings of a sense of scale to important questions that are almost impossible to quantify. Sometimes my calculations and assumptions are highly debatable, but I’ve included them because I think that just going through the thought process can be a useful reflection on something that matters. Examples include the footprint of having a child, waging a nuclear war, or sending a text message.

If you think you can offer an improvement on any of the numbers in this book, I’ll be very happy to hear from you ( ).

... but they will do...

Let me be emphatic that the uncertainty does not negate the exercise. Real footprints are the essential measure, and nothing short of them will do. The level of accuracy that I have described is good enough to separate out the flying from the hand drying. And even if you use the numbers here to make finely balanced decisions, most of the time those choices will be better informed than if you had no guidelines at all.

... for now

That we find footprinting tricky is a problem for us all. The situation we are in is like sailing round the world with a map from the 1700s. How should we respond? Throw that map away and have nothing? Definitely not! Use a high-quality map of just a small part of the ocean and ignore the rest? No way. Use the maps we have but treat them with caution? Absolutely. Try to make better maps? Of course—and the work is ongoing. This book is just an early map. Better ones will follow. And this book is trying to help you improve the carbon map that you carry around in your own head.

Making sense of the numbers

So far we’ve established what we need to try to measure, but a ton of carbon is still a highly abstract concept. I’m now going to try to give it a bit more real-life meaning.

A note about units

When this book was first published in the U.K., the measurements were given in grams, kilograms, and tones (metric tons). For this North American edition, I have added some conversions for clarity—in particular, I have given the pound equivalents for measurements in kilograms. Note, however, that because I am trying simply to give a sense of scale, the conversions aren’t always to the same precision: for example, when only approximations are needed, such as in the chapter and section titles, I’ve simply rounded 1 kg to 2 pounds. In reality, 1 pound is roughly 2.2 pounds, and in the text where more precision is helpful, that’s the figure I have used.

I have not, however, offered any conversions to most of the measurements in grams. One gram is the mass of about 15 drops of water, and there are 30 grams in an ounce. Because there is such a large disparity between a gram and an ounce, including conversions would lead to unwieldy strings of numbers with a lot of decimal places that detract from the bigger picture.

At the other end of the spectrum are tons, and since a tonne, or metric ton, is reasonably close to a U.S. ton, I’ve simply given measurements in tons only, without bothering with any conversions. I took the same approach with liters and quarts, which are fairly close, and all gallons mentioned in the text are U.S. gallons.

What does a ton of CO2e look like?

If you filled a couple of standard-sized 60-gallon garden water tanks to the brim with gasoline and set fire to them, about a ton of carbon would be directly released into the atmosphere. (The carbon footprint of burning that gas by driving is a bit more than that, for reasons explained later.) If you did the same with two cups of gas, that would release just over a kilogram (2 pounds) of carbon dioxide, and if you burned a blob about the size of a chickpea, that would release about a gram. There are a thousand grams in a kilogram and roughly a thousand kilograms in a ton.

How many tons do we each cause?

To give a quick sense of scale, the average North American currently has an annual carbon footprint of around 28 tons. Australians are a tad higher still at around 30 tons, while for the U.K. the figure is around 15 tons. The Chinese weigh in at just 3 tons per head and the Malawians at a tiny 100 kg (about 220 lbs.). Our global average is about 7 tons each. There is more detail on this later on. You get smaller numbers if you include only the obvious bits of your footprint such as household energy and travel or you miss out emissions on goods you buy that are manufactured overseas.

The 10-ton lifestyle

I’m not here to set you a particular target or to make you feel guilty. How you decide to live is a choice that only you can make. I just want to help you understand carbon so that you can do whatever you decide to do with more knowledge.

However, to help get a sense of perspective, I have adopted a 10-ton lifestyle as another unit of measure for this book. I am going to refer to it from time to time, because it gives an alternative and sometimes clearer way of conceiving of those abstract grams and tons of CO2e.

There is not much that is particularly magical about a 10-ton lifestyle—that is, a lifestyle causing 10 tons of CO2e per year—apart from the fact that 10 tons is a round number. It’s certainly not a long-term sustainable target for everyone in the world: if everyone went in for 10-ton living all over the globe, emissions would skyrocket by 40 percent.

I’ve chosen 10 tons as a realistic target that most people ought to be able to meet. For the average North American it would mean a reduction of almost to two-thirds. In the U.K. and many other European countries, it entails reducing your emissions to only about one-third below your national average.

One way of thinking about the footprint of an object or activity is to put it in the context of a year’s worth of 10-ton living. For example, a large cheeseburger, with a footprint of 2.5 kg (5.5 lbs.) CO2e, represents about 2 hours’ worth of a 10-ton year. If you drive a fairly thirsty car for 1,000 miles, that is 800 kg (1,75o lbs.) CO2e, or a month’s ration. If you leave a couple of the (now old-fashioned) 100-watt incandescent light bulbs on for a year, that would be another month used up. One typical return flight from Los Angeles to Barcelona burns up around 4.6 tons CO2e. That is just under 6 months’ ration in the 10-ton lifestyle.

Truly sustainable long-term targets aren’t practical or helpful in the short term. For example, the U.K.’s target to cut carbon emissions by 80 percent by 2050 is currently the most ambitious of any major economy. If you were to apply this to the stuff they import as well as to the emissions within the country itself, that would take them down to around 3 tons per person per year. Some commentators think they’ll need to go even lower. Ultimately, though, it’s virtually impossible for an individual in the developed world to get down to a 3-ton lifestyle any time soon. That kind of cut requires the whole economy to be made greener. More modestly, the government of Canada is committed to reducing total greenhouse gas emissions by 17 percent from 2005 levels by 2020, aligned with U.S. targets.5 A short car commute, a daily cheeseburger, and some wasteful lighting habits could easily use up a quarter of the 10-ton budget. Then if you also take the flight from L.A. to Barcelona, that would leave just 3 months’ ration left in the 10-ton budget for everything else that year: other food, heat, buying stuff, health care, use of other public services, your contribution to the maintenance of roads, any wars around the world that your government is involved in (like it or not)—the lot.

You might be wondering whether there are any better ways of spending this or any other sized budget besides blowing most of it on burgers, commuting, and flying. If that question is of interest, this book should give some clues.

How many tons for a life or a death?

I hope the comparisons so far have helped to make a ton of carbon seem a bit more tangible. But let’s see whether it’s possible to get a handle on how much it might actually matter. Our species is good at understanding the direct, immediate, and visible consequences of our actions. We are a lot less smart at grasping the consequences when they are dispersed across billions of people whom we will never meet. This might not have mattered when we lived in caves, but it won’t let us live well in a global society. Our impacts used to be local and visible. Today they are not. Perhaps we need to find it as shocking when we see dispersed suffering inflicted through needless carbon emissions as it would be to see the same suffering inflicted all in one place in front of our eyes by, let’s say, a street stabbing.

I did some “back of the envelope” sums and arrived at a figure of 150 tons CO2e per climate change–related death. I’ve spelled out my calculations in the endnote that follows this sentence.6 If you look it up and follow my sums, you’ll see that I don’t have even the beginnings of a rigorous argument to justify my figure. But it was an interesting thought process and one that, if you do decide to follow it, you might even find faintly plausible. Or you may think my line of thought is hopelessly unrealistic. And maybe you would be right. I was just playing with ideas. It is up to you to decide what meaning to take from them. For me, even a possibility of any realism in this line of thought throws up a challenge.

The 150 tons per life figure would mean that if your lifestyle had the footprint of the average U.S. citizen, one person would have to die from climate change somewhere in the world every 5 years. If you were to fly from L.A. to Barcelona and back 11 times first class—that would be another death.

How much would it be worth paying to save a ton of carbon?

This is not going to be an easy question to answer. An unknown number of lives depends on our response to climate change, and even if we did know how many, it is not as if our society has a consistent approach, even in the very broadest of terms, to determining the kind of value that each one of those lives might have. So, putting a financial value on the saving of a ton of carbon is going to be tough, to put it mildly. Nevertheless, it’s a question worth pondering because unless we understand there to be real and tangible value in cutting emissions, we will simply never bother and, for better or worse, money has become our language for understanding value.

As I write, the equivalent of $18 per ton is the maximum price of CO2 that companies in the U.K. could have to pay.7 Let’s see what happens if we work on that figure. With global emissions at 50 billion tons, does that mean that the world might be prepared to pay just $900 billion to eradicate our emissions completely? Is that really all it’s worth to us? That’s about three-quarters of a percent of global output in economic terms to have a miracle cure for climate change? A bargain, surely.

Let’s see what $18 per ton implies if you link it in to my estimate of 150 tons per death. That would put the value of a life at just $2,700. The value of the world’s population under this analysis is a mere $18 trillion, or about six times the Gross Domestic Product of the U.K. My hometown of Kendal has about 24,000 people. Would it really be a good deal to blow up everyone in it if it would liberate $65 million? This analysis places the value of the U.K. population at just $164 billion. In other words, the people living in the U.K. are valued at about 5 percent of their GDP.

So how much should it be worth in financial terms to save a ton of carbon? A great deal more than the $18, clearly!