How Bad Are Bananas?: The Carbon Footprint of Everything

I remember spending some time with calculating energy use for bicycling. There was a lot of debate and calculations going around. It became a fool's errand to try to calculate CO2 usage. A bike ride powered by hamburgers could be responsible for many more emissions than a bike ride powered by potatoes. You could also look forward and consider that a bike ride extends life, thus leading to more lifetime CO2 production. However, it also reduces medical visits, reducing environmental burden. The "fuel" consumption also assumes that the bike rider will eat additional calories equal to those consumed. If instead, the driver and bike rider consume the same calories, their emissions will be the same. The driver is also likely to add more weight with the extra calories. This extra weight will require more emissions to maintain. It will also make future transportation more expensive due to the extra weight. 

Looking in all directions is what makes calculating greenhouse gas impact so hard. It is easy to say that a car ride emitted X amount of CO2 from the combustion of gasoline. An electric car doesn't burn gasoline, so it must be great on the environment, right? Alas, it still uses electricity which is generated by multiple means on the grid. Most likely the marginal extra use from the car is made possible by burning fossil fuels. (Only if the grid was 100% renewable could we assume it came from renewable sources.) This only takes into account the burning of the fuel source. This is also the production of the fuel (drilling for oil, mining coal, etc.) There is also the infrastructure needed to produce the fuel and that needed to produce energy (solar panels and wind farms still have a cost.) Then there is transportation infrastructure - power lines, pipelines, electric grid. And that just gets us our power. After the fuel. We also need the emissions in building the vehicle and maintaining it. This is as far as the book goes. However, the car would not be useful if it were not for roads and parking lots. We also need to account for traffic jams, crashes, highway patrol, larger lots to account for cars, and many other things. There are emissions tentacles that stretch on in every direction. How much do you allocate to each source?

How Bad Are Bananas makes an attempt to quantify some of the many emissions that go into parts of everyday life. There are "numbers" given, but the author stresses that it is the order of magnitude that matters the most. In our world there is often clever carbon accounting that goes on. One side may claim to be "net zero" by buying credits from another side that also brags about their environmental stewardship. Countries often "export" their emissions, by using emission-intensive goods produced by other countries. This all makes it even harder to calculate the full impact. 

Cost does seem to be a helpful rule of thumb, though subsidies and differences in regulations can confuse the matter. In general, the more we spend, the more carbon we emit. If we spend a lot on personal services, we are transferring the carbon decisions to those people. Air travel can be extra carbon intensive due to altitude. Eating meat and animal products can also be very carbon intensive. The animals "waste" a lot of carbon on supporting their lives. They also "emit" a lot of methane in their digestive process. (Again, things get confusing. A confined chicken operation has less "waste" at the expense of animal welfare. A herd of cattle free-ranging on a pasture may be providing benefit to the land.) Even renewable energy sources like turbines and solar panels cost a lot to produce and have a limited life span. Carbon emission per person generally goes up as income goes up. If we don't want to sacrifice our quality of life, there are other big picture areas we can focus on. Continuing to use what we have rather than buying new is often helpful. Buying an old house in the city center may be costly, but pay huge dividends. (It also saves the destruction of forest for the suburban tract home.) We all need to focus on the big picture - if only we could better understand it.