Right now, could you prepare a slice of toast with zero embodied carbon emissions?
Since at least the 2000s, big polluters have tried to frame carbon emissions as an issue to be solved through the purchasing choices of individual consumers.
Solving climate change, we’ve been told, is not a matter of public policy or infrastructure. Instead, it’s about convincing individual consumers to reduce their “carbon footprint” (a term coined by BP: https://amp.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2021/aug/23/big-oil-coined-carbon-footprints-to-blame-us-for-their-greed-keep-them-on-the-hook).
Yet, right now, millions of people couldn’t prepare a slice of toast without causing carbon emissions, even if they wanted to.
In many low-density single-use-zoned suburbs, the only realistic option for getting to the store to get a loaf of bread is to drive. The power coming out of the mains includes energy from coal or gas.
But.
Even if they invested in solar panels, and an inverter, and a battery system, and only used an electric toaster, and baked the loaf themselves in an electric oven, and walked/cycled/drove an EV to the store to get flour and yeast, there are still embodied carbon emissions in that loaf of bread.
Just think about the diesel powered trucks used to transport the grains and packaging to the flour factory, the energy used to power the milling equipment, and the diesel fuel used to transport that flour to the store.
Basically, unless you go completely off grid and grow your own organic wheat, your zero emissions toast just ain’t happening.
And that’s for the most basic of food products!
Unless we get the infrastructure in place to move to a 100% renewables and storage grid, and use it to power fully electric freight rail and zero emissions passenger transport, pretty much all of our decarbonisation efforts are non-starters.
This is fundamentally an infrastructure and public policy problem, not a problem of individual consumer choice.
#ClimateChange #urbanism #infrastructure #energy #grid #politics #power @green
@ajsadauskas
These are excuse trotted out by deniers in order to keep emitting and/ comes from entitlment. Not saying that’s you bit thats essentially the sane arguments they use
As to the toast allegory, it’s a nonsense argument because even then poorest Africans have emissions, a duck has emsisions, the debate needs to be around sustainable emsisions.
Apparently BP holds a gun to peoples heads and tells them not to vote Green, to fly to Bali for holidays and to buy a car and not cycle. It’s not their fault Chevron hasn’t invented a zero emsisions plane and zero emissions hovercraft.
You will AlWAYS have emsisions, the trick is we need get them to about 2-3t per annum (living like the average Cuban, not the average Australian) so do your bit to get your personal emisisons down to where they need to be AND vote Green to move the Overton Window and start allowing structural reform.
If it all sounds too hard just wait a few decades until Climate Changes destruction really hits home to even the developed world.
Everyone has to eat, no one has to fly or drive a car. Everyone can Vote Green (not to get them into power but to show all polticans it’s time to take this seriously) and to allow the rise if the really radical politcans we need.
Voters don’t, not becase of BP, Chevron or Shell but becase of greed, entitlement and apathy.
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>“Nobody made a greater mistake than he who did nothing because he could do only a little.” -Edmund Burke
@green
@largess @ajsadauskas @green “No-one has to drive a car” is a pretty sweeping statement that I would argue is also entirely factually wrong. If you live 10 miles from work somewhere where there’s been decades of no provision for any other form of transport, you need systemic change before not driving is an option.
@wav3ydave @largess @ajsadauskas @green The society we live in means some of us have enough money to have choices and some of us don’t. Those of us who can make choices should absolutely make the greener ones (I can afford a nutritious vegan diet, have the education to choose to get a job somewhere I can cycle to, didn’t have to move to another country for work so don’t have to fly when I want to see my family) but not everyone does
@wav3ydave @largess @ajsadauskas @green I don’t think it has to be a personal choice vs collective action dichotomy, we need a three pronged approach: 1) persuade those who can make better choices to make them 2) fight for a more equitable society so everyone has access to less damaging choices 3) make the better choices the easier, cheaper or default