{"id":699,"date":"2020-11-13T23:05:50","date_gmt":"2020-11-13T23:05:50","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/alexzimmerman.ca\/?p=699"},"modified":"2020-11-13T23:06:24","modified_gmt":"2020-11-13T23:06:24","slug":"personal-vs-societal-responsibility-for-ghg-emissions","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/alexzimmerman.ca\/index.php\/blog\/personal-vs-societal-responsibility-for-ghg-emissions\/","title":{"rendered":"Personal vs Societal Responsibility for GHG Emissions"},"content":{"rendered":"\t\t
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I have neglected my blog in favour of pursuing other interests over the summer, but I want to explore several related ideas over the next three blog posts this fall. The first will explore how much of the environmental crisis is attributable to personal choice and how much is effectively beyond our individual control. The second will look at whether there may be a social-media-like platform that elicits commonalities, not divisions, and which could build consensus and inform policy around the climate crisis. Lastly, I want to discuss to what extent technological disruption will play a role\/influence our fate or even perhaps save us from ourselves in the climate crisis.<\/p>

Personal vs Societal Responsibility for GHG Emissions<\/u><\/strong><\/p>

The discussion around the climate crisis and solutions to it is often dominated by a focus on choices made by individuals. There is an insidious aspect to this. It implies that if causes, and therefore solutions, to the climate crisis arise largely as a result as a consequence of aggregate individual choice, then climate change is your fault because you are not making the correct choices, and further, it is somehow a moral or ethical failing on your part. Not only that, it lets societal institutions avoid acknowledging their responsibility and acting on it.<\/p>

The fossil fuel industry plays its part in furthering this narrative. A recent (Nov 2nd<\/sup>) Twitter poll<\/a> conducted by Shell, is a good example. It asked the question: \u201cWhat are you<\/em><\/strong> willing to change to help reduce emissions?\u201d (emphasis added by me), and offered 4 alternatives, 3 of which had to do with personal choice.<\/p>\t\t\t\t\t\t\t\t<\/div>\n\t\t\t\t<\/div>\n\t\t\t\t

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But really, how much of climate impact is in fact due to personal choice and how much is effectively beyond our individual control because of societal choices? I decided to explore this question by looking at our household carbon footprint and the effect of some changes that we have made recently, together with one more change we could make. I used an online calculator<\/a> that takes into account differences between countries and Canadian provinces. I used data from 3 years ago for the \u201cBefore\u201d case and data from this last year for the \u201cAfter\u201d case.<\/p>\t\t\t\t\t\t\t\t<\/div>\n\t\t\t\t<\/div>\n\t\t\t\t

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As you can see from this pie chart, the footprint for our 2-person household was 16.16 tonnes. The biggest single item was food, followed by electricity and natural gas for the house, followed by transportation more or less equally shared by automobile fuel and air travel. These top 4 accounted for 77% of all carbon emissions. The remaining 23% is divided among 11 different categories, each averaging about 2% of the total.<\/p>

Two years ago, we acquired a battery electric vehicle (EV), a Nissan Leaf. It is our daily use vehicle, when we use a car. I still ride my bicycle for most in-town trips. I have kept the internal combustion (ICE) vehicle for towing my small boat, as most EVs, ours included, will void the warranty if you tow anything with them. However, the ICE mileage is down drastically from before acquiring the EV. The other significant change we made was to replace our end-of-life gas furnace with an air-to-air heat pump, with a high efficiency condensing gas furnace as backup. There is one more change we have not yet made, but which I entered into the calculator for comparison purposes, which is to switch to an all-vegetarian diet.<\/p>

How much difference has it made?<\/p>\t\t\t\t\t\t\t\t<\/div>\n\t\t\t\t<\/div>\n\t\t\t\t

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As the \u201cAfter\u201d pie chart now shows, the carbon footprint would be 10.5 tonnes, about a 35% reduction. The biggest single reduction was to replace the furnace with the heat pump \u2013 a nearly 3 tonne reduction. The next biggest change was to reduce the flying. We had been making an international flight every 2-3 years but this year have gone nowhere by plane, and late next year I may only make a shorter flight to visit my relatives back east. That change brings a reduction of more than a tonne. Driving the EV reduces the carbon footprint by just under a tonne, but it is a 40% reduction from before. The surprise for me is that an all vegetarian diet only reduces our food footprint 19%, less than a tonne, perhaps because we don\u2019t eat a lot of meat currently. The remaining 11 categories are the same as the \u201cBefore\u201d case.<\/p>\n

What lessons can be drawn from this exercise?<\/p>\n

The first is that personal choice can indeed make some difference. The 3 changes we have made \u2013 heat pump, EV, flying less, together reduced our footprint by about a third.<\/p>\n

The second lesson is two-fold.<\/p>\n

Most of the remaining categories don\u2019t offer a lot of scope for big reductions. We are not likely, for example, to stop buying insurance, paying for connectivity or for pharmaceuticals that keep us alive and healthy. Food, in the \u201cAfter\u201d case, is also not something that we can do without, and it becomes the single biggest source of carbon in our situation, more than 40% of it.<\/p>\n

Also, and I think this is the biggest take-away, is that we, as individuals, have very little control over the carbon footprint of the remaining categories. We don\u2019t have control over how pharmaceuticals are produced. We don\u2019t have control over which buildings insurance companies occupy (the largest source of their carbon footprint, apparently). While we can reduce the impact of clothing and shoes to some extent by being mindful of the types that we buy, that stuff wears out and needs to be replaced, and the more active you are the faster it wears out. We can chip away at the remaining categories by changing some of our choices, but the total reduction from those changes won\u2019t amount to much.<\/p>\n

Let\u2019s examine the big categories again; food, housing and transportation.<\/p>\n

Our industrial food system means that most of the food that we city-dwellers eat is produced far away using carbon-intensive methods, incurring a large carbon footprint to grow, store and ship it to us. It may be that the calculator I used overstates the case somewhat, as it probably doesn\u2019t account for what we grow in our home garden or the local produce we buy in season, but many people do not have access to a garden or local produce, so it\u2019s likely accurate on average.<\/p>\n

The carbon footprint of housing and transportation is, for most of us, largely beyond our control. What housing is available is determined by land-use policies decided by municipal, regional and provincial governments. Housing developers rarely build housing that is any more energy efficient than code minimum. Individual home owners who can barely afford the basic cost of the home find it difficult to pay more up front for more efficient housing. If policies by various levels of government lead to excessively high housing prices in the city centres, people will necessarily migrate to the edges and the city\u2019s hinterland to find somewhere they can afford to live.<\/p>\n

If transportation money to those outlying regions is put into highways instead of mass transit, you can hardly blame people for buying cars to commute to their jobs \u2013 what choice do they have? If fossil fuel exploration and production is subsidized through tax breaks and royalty deferments way more than renewables are (about 23X more in British Columbia in 2017), then it is not reasonable to expect people to buy renewables over the subsidized, apparently cheaper fossil fuels.<\/p>\n

My point is this: while there are things we can and should do as individuals, the majority of the carbon footprint we have is determined by societal choices, choices and decisions made by government. In this struggle, government really matters and therefore who you vote for matters – politics matters.<\/p>\n

However, our system of governance is not well designed to produce solutions. I\u2019ll explore some of that in the next blog.<\/p>\t\t\t\t\t\t\t\t<\/div>\n\t\t\t\t<\/div>\n\t\t\t\t\t<\/div>\n\t\t<\/div>\n\t\t\t\t\t<\/div>\n\t\t<\/section>\n\t\t\t\t<\/div>\n\t\t","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

  I have neglected my blog in favour of pursuing other interests over the summer, but I want to explore several related ideas over the next three blog posts this fall. The first will explore how much of the environmental crisis is attributable to personal choice and how much is effectively beyond our individual control. 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