More of my nights are in a plane than in a bed,
maybe even counting hotels.
— TOM STUKER, first consumer to fly a million miles in a year
So far, by making changes to my daily life, I’ve reduced my emissions by more than a factor of ten. I used to emit slightly more greenhouse gases than the average American. Now I emit less than the average human (see Figure 9.1). However, I still emit nearly twice the average Bangladeshi,1 and infinitely more than a wild, nonhuman Earthling.
This level of reduction, while incomplete, allows my family and me to continue a normal suburban life. This suggests that a similar reduction is well within reach for many of us. And as more people make significant reductions, and systemic alternatives to fossil fuel become increasingly available, going the rest of the way will become easier.
To accomplish my reduction, I first had to understand the sources of my climate impact. Basic quantification enabled me to address the biggest sources first. Figure 9.2 shows my estimated emissions of greenhouse gases for 2010. Air travel dominated every thing else, but I’d been entirely unaware of this! The simple act of quantification shattered my preconceptions and shined a bright light onto my ignorance.
Quantification allowed me to develop awareness of my daily actions, which was a prerequisite to changing them. Gradually, I’ve become more aware of what I’m doing in any given moment, and how my actions affect other beings. Daily life is a series of choices; in US society, many of these choices lead to fossil fuels. Finding alternatives requires creativity. For me, it has felt like a fun and engaging game.
FIGURE 9.1. My personal greenhouse gas emissions from 2010 to 2014, in metric tonnes of CO2-equivalents (CO2e), for seven categories. Category labels are in same vertical order as swaths. Horizontal dotted lines indicate average US emissions and average human emissions. The estimates for flying include only CO2 emissions, and exclude contrail, cirrus, and NOx effects.
Figure 9.2 also shows my 2012 and 2014 emissions. As I ramped down flying, I also reduced my emissions from food, waste, and driving. I became vegetarian, started growing food, and began obtaining much of my food from the waste stream (freeganism). I started composting aggressively, and biking became my primary mode of transportation.
FIGURE 9.2. (opposite) US mean per capita emissions (top) and my emissions in 2010, 2012, and 2014, for seven categories. As in the previous figure, the estimates for flying exclude non-CO2 effects.
Some people see no value in personal reductions. They haven’t cut their own emissions, and they justify their inaction by assuming individual-level reductions don’t make any difference. They assume that it requires too much sacrifice. None of this has been true in my experience.
Perhaps surprisingly, my main motivation for reducing was not to keep my own emissions out of the atmosphere. One person’s reduction is a tiny drop in a vast ocean of human greenhouse gas emissions. If directly reducing global emissions were my main motivation, I’d find it depressing, like trying to save the world all by myself. Instead, I reduce for three much better reasons.
First, I enjoy living with less fossil fuel. I love biking, I love growing food, and I love being at home with my family instead of away at conferences. Less fossil fuel has meant more connection with the land, with food, with family and friends, and with community. If through some magic spell, global warming were to suddenly and completely vanish, I’d continue living with far less fossil fuel.2
Second, by moving away from fossil fuel, I’m aligning my actions with my principles. Burning fossil fuel with the knowledge of the harm it causes creates cognitive dissonance, which can lead to feelings of guilt, panic, or depression. Others might respond to this cognitive dissonance with cynicism, or perhaps by denying that fossil fuels are harmful. But I find that a better option is simply to align action to principle.
Finally, I believe personal reduction does help, indirectly, by shifting the culture. I’ve had countless discussions about the changes I’ve made, and I’ve seen many people around me begin to make similar changes in their own lives. By changing ourselves, we help others envision change. We gradually shift cultural norms.
The essential story I’m telling is that life can be better without fossil fuel. I’ve experienced this to be true; if others also experience this to be true, who’s to say the story won’t develop a powerful, change-making resonance?
Of course, there’s no reason to limit our actions to the personal sphere. I find that actions aimed at the personal and actions aimed at the collective are mutually reinforcing. I see no reason not to do both.
It is remarkable how long men will believe in the bottomlessness of a pond without taking the trouble to sound it.
— HENRY DAVID THOREAU, Walden
This section gives the details behind my estimates as well as the tools you need to assess your own situation. But first, a few general considerations.
The average US citizen’s emissions profile (Figure 9.2) looks nothing like my 2010 profile. Your emissions profile is likely also unique. Your life is different from mine, and you must understand the idiosyncrasies of your own situation before you can take meaningful action.
These days, there are lots of suggestions for how we can “save the planet,” but very little about their relative effectiveness. This lack of distinction paves the way for greenwash (for example, airports “going green”). Lack of quantification also kept me from realizing the impact of my flying, despite my deep concern over global warming.
Not everyone’s emissions will be as dominated by flying as mine were. Many US citizens don’t fly at all, so national average emissions from flying are low. Someone close to this average profile—whose major emissions are from driving, new stuff, electricity, and food—should naturally focus on things like bicycling, living close to work, buying less stuff, sourcing renewable electricity, and eating less meat.
I’ve represented estimates of the relative reductions from my major actions in Figure 9.3. My five most effective actions were quitting planes, vegetarianism, bicycling, freeganism, and composting. This is such an important point—that not all actions are equal in terms of emissions reductions—that I’ve also tabulated the estimates in Table 9.1.
FIGURE 9.3. My reductions proportional to areas of circles. Quitting planes is the all-encompassing black circle. L indicates taking care to turn off lights; CL indicates switching to a clothesline.
Our predicament consists of many interconnected processes, systems, and mindsets. It’s larger than global warming. Being locked into the old story of separation and amplification of our egos (by reacting automatically with craving and aversion) underlies much of this. Therefore, anything we do to counter these bad mental habits and to build a more beautiful world helps at some level.3 For example, the moment in which we observe an impulse to say something negative—and we stop ourselves—is a wonderful moment. So is the moment in which we help another without expecting anything in return.
TABLE 9.1. Emissions reductions from some of the changes I made to my daily life. Note that your potential for reductions from these changes depends on your own particular situation: if you already fly very little, you won’t see a 16.5 tonne reduction from quitting planes! Also, you might experience much larger reductions than I did by switching to renewable electricity and solar hot water.
Action |
Annual reduction |
quitting planes |
16,500 kg CO2 |
freeganism |
2,000 kg CO2e |
vegetarianism |
1,500 kg CO2e |
bicycling |
1,000 kg CO2 |
composting |
700 kg CO2e |
driving on WVO |
400 kg CO2 |
growing food |
300 kg CO2e |
reducing pilot lights |
300 kg CO2e |
renewable electricity |
300 kg CO2e |
solar hot water |
200 kg CO2e |
humanure |
150 kg CO2e |
clothesline |
100 kg CO2e |
turning off lights |
50 kg CO2e |
However, the fact remains that humanity urgently needs to stop burning fossil fuels. Photons interacting with the atmosphere don’t respond to our acts of kindness; they only respond to our acts of greenhouse gas emission. An appropriate response to our predicament, then, must also include actions that target emissions. These concrete, focused actions, taken by enough individuals to create cultural shift, will begin to change the systems and institutions that lead us to mindlessly burn huge amounts of fossil fuels in our daily lives. One of the most effective actions any of us can take as an individual is to radically reduce our own fossil fuel use. Doing this even caused my advocacy for collective action to become more resonant and powerful.
TABLE 9.2. Climate impact conversion factors, as discussed in the text. I’ve shown CO2-only emissions for curiosity’s sake; for quantifying your emissions, I recommend that you use the CO2e values.
FIGURE 9.4. Contrails over southeastern US on October 13, 2004. High ice clouds like contrails and cirrus are mostly transparent to incoming solar (shortwave) radiation, but mostly opaque to outgoing thermal (longwave) radiation; they therefore warm the climate.
The yardstick we’ll use for measuring climate impact is kilograms (kg) or metric tonnes (1 tonne = 1,000 kg) of CO2-equivalents (CO2e). As discussed in Chapter 3, climate impact from other sources (such as methane) is converted into CO2e, a greenhouse-effect-equivalent amount of CO2, for apples-to-apples comparison.
Table 9.2 gives conversion factors from daily life units to CO2e amounts.4 (I’ll explain how I came up with them below.) These estimates include the “upstream” emissions generated from obtaining and processing the fuels, which add an additional 20% or so5 beyond what’s emitted by burning the end product. Note that upstream emissions are rising as we increasingly turn to energy-intensive production methods like fracking, deep offshore drilling, and tar sands extraction.
Hour for hour, the quickest way a normal human can warm the planet is by flying on a commercial plane. Airplanes contribute to global warming via CO2 emissions, NOx emissions,6 contrails, and cirrus cloud formation (Figure 9.4). High icy clouds such as contrails and cirrus let the sun through but trap outgoing thermal radiation from the ground, warming the planet.
The global warming contribution from the average plane’s CO2 emissions alone is 0.3 kg CO2 per passenger mile.7 That’s for coach; first-class or business-class fliers are responsible for twice these rates of emissions, as they take up over twice the space on a plane.8 Then, the non-CO2 effects likely double or triple the global warming potential of airplanes.9 Unlike CO2, these effects are short-term: if planes suddenly stopped flying, they’d disappear within days.
The act of flying is an exercise of privilege. Globally, only about 5% of humans have ever flown.10 The average American emits about 1,000 kg CO211 per year from flying,12 which is roughly equivalent to one 4,000-mile round-trip between Los Angeles and Chicago. In 2010, however, I flew 50,000 miles, equivalent to two transatlantic and six domestic flights. My flights that year resulted in 16 metric tonnes of CO2.
Academics are expected to fly to universities and conferences to talk about their research. This provides visibility for job offers and funding. Many of my friends and colleagues fly more than 100,000 miles per year; climate scientists fly just as much as astrophysicists (and other academics). There’s little interest in teleconferencing.
Nonetheless, flying in commercial planes began to feel increasingly unwholesome to me.13 I gradually ramped down my air travel as it dawned on me that the benefits to my career weren’t worth the negative consequences.14 Who would pay the real cost of my flights? I decided I couldn’t justify putting my career over the biosphere. I imagined my kids someday saying, “Dad, how could you keep flying around the world giving 20-minute updates on your research when you knew the impact?” They would be right to ask this.
I now prefer slow and adventurous travel to fast travel. By not flying all the time, I’m able to connect much more deeply to my local community, which is satisfying. Nor do I miss the jet-setting life: the hotels, the homesickness, the airport lines, the jet lag, and the colds I’d often catch on planes. (Indeed, modern air travel is the ideal way for a local outbreak to spread into a pandemic.)
I decided to only include the long-term CO2 portion of airplane impact in the above pie charts, which makes airplanes look much better than they really are. But either way, the basic conclusion was inescapable: reducing my emissions would require flying less.
My largest climate impact was from flying, but the average American’s largest climate impact is from driving. In the US, the average person emits about 5,000 kg CO2 per year from driving.15 A map of any city’s CO2 emissions looks exactly like a map of that city’s expressways (or as Sharon calls them, petrol deathways16).
Here we’re only considering the impact from fuel—burning a gallon of gas emits 11.3 kg CO2, while burning a gallon of diesel emits 12.1 kg CO217—but keep in mind that driving requires roads, bridges, parking, and the cars and trucks themselves, the creation of which also produces emissions.
In 2010, Sharon and I burned 330 gallons of gas to drive a 45 mpg gasoline car about 15,000 miles. I’ll claim ⅓ of these emissions (1,200 kg CO2), a guess, attributing the rest to Sharon and our sons.
Since 2011, most of my driving has been in Maeby, a 1984 diesel Mercedes-Benz fueled by waste vegetable oil (WVO). Burning plant oil doesn’t increase the net CO2 in the atmosphere. The plants capture CO2 from the atmosphere to make the oil, and burning the oil releases that same CO2 back to the atmosphere for no net gain.18
Maeby is useful for hauling heavy or bulky materials or for traveling great distances. However, for trips of fewer than ten miles, I prefer riding my bike. Biking is more fun, which is saying something, as I still get a thrill when I flip the two switches on my dashboard that take Maeby from diesel to veg.
Maeby requires a cup of diesel to warm up before switching to WVO. In 2012, my personal use of diesel fuel in Maeby came out to 13 gallons (I kept a log for three months, then multiplied by four). In addition, I burned about 10 gallons of gasoline in other cars for a total of 300 kg CO2. In 2013, my portion was three gallons of diesel and two gallons of gas, for total estimated emissions of 50 kg CO2. The improvement came from more biking and less driving.
Switching from fossil fuel to WVO eliminated 400 kg CO2 per year. But biking reduced my annual emissions by 1,000 kg CO2 as it became my primary mode of transportation.19
Natural gas is often touted as a bridge fuel, a clean pathway for transitioning from fossil fuels to renewables. This is because natural gas emits only half as much CO2 as coal on an energy-equivalent basis.
However, natural gas also leaks into the air at every step in its life cycle, and it’s a far more potent greenhouse gas than CO2. As gas leaks from wells, pipelines, processing plants, and the 100-year-old cast-iron pipes under our streets,20 it contributes significantly to global warming.
After refining, natural gas is essentially 100% methane,21 and the global warming potential (GWP) of methane is about 105 and 33 times that of CO2 on 20-year and 100-year time horizons, respectively.22 Here, I’ll use the average value of the 20-and 100-year time horizons, assigning 1 kg of methane a GWP of 65 kg CO2e.23
The gas extracted from shale deposits is not a “bridge” to a renewable energy future—it’s a gangplank.
— ANTHONY INGRAFFEA, fracturing engineer
At a GWP of 65, methane leakage of 4% or more would make natural gas worse than coal in terms of climate change.24 A 2011 study by Howarth et al. estimated total leakage at between 3.6% and 7.9% for gas produced by fracking and 1.7% and 6% for conventional gas.25 Subsequent airborne measurements over Uintah County, Utah, estimated leakage at between 6.2% and 11.7% of production.26 Because of this leakage, an energy system built on natural gas might well be worse for the climate than one built on coal.
Meanwhile, energy utilities and municipalities in the US are scrambling to transition to natural gas, because they mistakenly view it as the “green fossil fuel.” In terms of global warming, this is a mistake.
A major regulatory overhaul of natural gas drilling operations combined with a major infrastructure overhaul could eliminate some of the leaks. However, to be meaningful, this overhaul would need to include the old pipes running under our streets, and this would be extremely expensive: laid end to end, the natural gas pipe in the US alone would stretch to and from the moon almost three times.27 Perhaps we’d be wiser to leave natural gas and gas appliances behind as quickly as possible, replacing them with carbon-free electricity instead.
Burning a therm of natural gas emits 5.3 kg CO2; including the upstream emissions bumps this amount to 6.1 kg CO2. To account for leakage, and since half of the gas consumed in the US is fracked, we can use the mean of the Howarth et al. ranges (5% methane leakage). This translates into an additional 6.5 kg CO2e from methane leakage per therm of natural gas,28 for total emissions of 13 kg CO2e per therm. The average American emits 2,000 kg CO2e per year from residential natural gas.29
When we first moved into our house in 2008, there were five pilot lights emitting a whopping 1,600 kg CO2e per year. We shouldn’t still be using pilot lights in an age of global warming! Eliminating two stove pilot lights cut 600 kg CO2e, and turning down the rest (oven, space heater, water heater) cut an additional 300 kg CO2.
In 2012, we used 372 therms of natural gas—4,400 kg CO2e—for heat, cooking, hot water, and drying clothes. We then switched to using a clothesline, which reduced our household CO2e emissions by 550 kg.
In 2016, our old gas water heater died, and I decided to replace it with a solar hot water heater. This reduced our household emissions by about 800 kg CO2e per year (most households would see a larger reduction30), but it was expensive at $4,000.31 I could go further down this route, replacing our old gas heater with an electric heat pump for around $5,000, and replacing our gas range and oven with an electric induction range and convection oven for $2,000.
These electrical devices would require upgrading our home’s outdated electrical wiring and service, which I expect would cost more than $7,000. For a total of $18,000, we could eliminate 2,500 kg CO2e in natural gas emissions per year. All this new stuff would have roughly 12,000 kg CO2e in embodied emissions (see below, and realize that the water heater had a rebate), so the emissions payback time, if running on renewable electricity, would be five years—not terrible, but not great, either. But we can’t afford all this. And for us, it wouldn’t even make sense from an annual operating cost perspective.
My second-largest climate impact came from food. This was another big surprise, revealed to me only by looking at the numbers.
Growing, processing, packaging, and distributing food produces greenhouse gases: CO2 from fuels, fertilizer production and land-use changes such as deforestation; nitrous oxide (N2O) from fertilizer production and application;32 and methane from livestock. About ⅓ of global greenhouse gas emissions are due to food production,33 and about ½ of this (15% of global emissions) is due to livestock,34 mainly cows.
Your individual emissions from food production naturally depend on your diet—what you eat, how much you eat, and how your food gets to your plate. Producing the food for typical meat, vegetarian, and vegan diets emits about 3,000, 1,500, and 1,000 kg CO2e per year, respectively.35 The average American diet emits 2,900 kg CO2e per year, slightly less than the average meat diet, since 3% of Americans are vegetarian (about half of whom are vegan).36
In 2012, I stopped eating meat primarily to avoid harming animals, and I personally prefer vegetarianism. In addition, it reduced my emissions by about 1,500 kg CO2e per year. Over the next few years, I began growing food, trading surpluses with neighbors, and rescuing supermarket discards (freeganism). Most of my food now comes from these sources. I estimate that freeganism alone reduces my food emissions by an additional 1,000 kg CO2e per year.37
You wouldn’t dream of leaving your water taps wide open when you’re not using them; I feel the same way about electricity. Electricity is precious.
Emissions from electricity depend on the method of generation. If your electricity is sourced from 100% renewables, then you have no electricity emissions. Otherwise, generating electricity in the US emits 0.9 kg CO2e per kWh on average.38
The typical American consumes 4,300 kWh of residential electricity per year, emitting 4,000 kg CO2e.39 In our house, we somehow use less than 1/10 of this per person. We don’t have a TV or air conditioner, and we’re careful to turn things off, but otherwise we use electricity liberally. I suspect that much residential electricity in the US is simply wasted, and that it would be quite possible to cut our national consumption by ½ or more without real sacrifice.
Rooftop solar probably makes sense for most 11,000 kWh-per-year households, but at our annual usage of only 1,200 kWh, it’s not yet cost-effective. Leasing isn’t an option for such a small system. But in 2016, SoCal Edison finally offered us a 100% renewable option. This will cost our household an additional $50 per year,40 a far better deal for us than rooftop solar.41 Before this option, my share of our household emissions came to 300 kg CO2e per year; afterwards, of course, it dropped to zero. I suspect SCE is responding to growing demand for community choice aggregation, an exciting strategy for switching entire regions to 100% renewable electricity, building community, and raising climate awareness (see Chapter 15).
Manufacturing new stuff—cars, clothes, computers, furniture, and so on—emits greenhouse gases. Estimating these emissions rigorously would be quite complicated, but for our purposes, a simple rule of thumb will suffice: each dollar spent on new stuff represents roughly 0.5 kg embodied CO2e emissions (counting manufacturing, packaging, and shipping).42
The average US person spends a little over $6,000 per year on new stuff.43 (Remarkably, ⅓ of this goes toward new cars,44 another measure of the automobile’s dominance in our lives.) Therefore, average emissions are something like 3,000 kg CO2e. My wife and I both prefer not having much stuff; our four-person household spends about $4,000 per year on goods (clothes, books, hardware, stuff from Target, etc.) My portion of these emissions is 500 kg CO2e.
These estimates don’t include housing. Building a modest two-bedroom house with modern industrial methods produces some 80 tonnes CO2e.45 We could divide emissions from long-lived items by the item’s lifetime to get annualized emissions. Our bungalow was built in 1926, and if it lasts another 60 years, we could assign 100 kg per year for each of the four people in my family. However, distributing the emissions in this simplistic way is clearly not right, because it doesn’t distinguish between buying new versus used. A careful accounting of such long-lived purchases should assign more emissions to the earliest years.
When we send our stuff to the landfill,46 the organics—food waste, yard waste, paper, and textiles—decompose anaerobically (without oxygen), producing methane. US landfills emit 1,300 kg CO2e per person per year.47 Let this sink in for a moment: our society has reached a point where even one person’s trash, taken by itself, generates more CO2e than the average Bangladeshi generates for everything.48
Sewage treatment plants in the US generate an additional 150 kg CO2e per person annually, due to the anaerobic decomposition of your “personal waste,” along with waste from industrial meat production; and also due to the electricity required to run the industrial-scale processing plants.49
This analysis highlights the need for change at the systems level: as a society, we should never, ever put organic material into landfills. It also highlights the interconnection between our food and waste systems, which I’ve begun thinking of as one integrated system. For example, two-thirds of food waste occur before the super market checkout line; as an individual, you have no control over that methane-emitting waste except by opting out of the industrial food system (see Chapter 13).
Still, composting is a wonderful practice. If you have a yard, you can safely compost your food waste, yard waste, and human waste (Chapter 12). This eliminates some of these waste emissions since backyard piles decompose aerobically, emitting CO2 instead of methane. Humanure cuts up to 150 kg CO2e of sewage treatment emissions, and composting food scraps and yard waste cuts another 400 kg CO2e.50
However, this means that, even if you compost aggressively, your landfill waste is still emitting 900 kg CO2e. On average in the US, ⅓ of this comes from the pre-consumer food waste I’ve already mentioned, ⅓ comes from non-recycled paper, and ⅓ comes from textiles.51 You can recycle nearly all your personal paper waste. What about clothes? I’ve tried composting rags and old jeans, but it didn’t work: the cloth decomposed too slowly. Until we design clothes for the home compost bin, we can find ways to opt out of buying new cloth, for example by exchanging used clothes with one another.
Riding Amtrak in coach class emits 0.14 kg CO2 per passenger mile.52 Long-haul buses (in this case, Greyhound) have about half the emissions of Amtrak: 0.07 kg CO2 per passenger mile.53
How the different travel options stack up is illustrated in Figure 9.5. For a given distance, carpooling four to a 50 mpg car emits less than taking the train, which emits less than a 50 mpg car (alone), which emits less than flying. Four people flying on a plane (in coach) emit 5 times the CO2 (and 14 times the short-term CO2e) as four people sharing a 50 mpg car. Keep in mind that we typically go many more miles in a plane than in a car, bus, or train. The average Amtrak ride, for example, is 218 miles.54
Trains still have potential for efficiency increases, and could run on renewable electricity. They therefore hold potential to become much more favorable relative to other modes of transport. But planes are already nearly as efficient as they can be.55
The categories we’ve considered so far—flying, driving, food, residential electricity, natural gas, stuff, and waste—come to a total of 20 tonnes per year for the average American. But what about emissions sources outside of these categories, such as roads, buildings, hospitals, and non-residential electricity? If we know the total emissions, we can get a rough idea about these other emissions.
FIGURE 9.5. Personal emissions for 4,000 miles of travel, equivalent to a round trip between Los Angeles and Chicago. For planes, the left and right sides of the bars give emissions in CO2 units and CO2e units (including short-term non-CO2 effects), respectively. For cars, the left and right sides of the bars give emissions for 50-mpg and 15-mpg cars, respectively.
According to the US EPA, in 2013 the US emitted a grand total of 7,700 million tonnes of greenhouse gases.56 Dividing by the US population, we find annual per capita emissions of 24 tonnes, 4 tonnes in excess of the total from our seven categories. This suggests that these other emissions amount to around 4 tonnes per person per year.
Changing to a low-energy lifestyle has saved my family thousands of dollars. We spend less than one-half what we used to on food, we buy far less gasoline and diesel, we spend less than $20 per month on electricity, and we save on air travel. We also see indirect savings, for example, from staying healthier.
By contrast, many of my friends have reduced their emissions by buying electric vehicles (EV), rooftop solar panels (PV), and other expensive equipment. While still out of reach for many, EVs are becoming more affordable. And I know folks who have saved $30 or $40 per month over their former monthly electric bills of $100 or more by “going solar.” Also, in my opinion, the embodied emissions payback times are impressively short. A new electric car represents seven tonnes of embodied CO2e emissions, equivalent to burning 700 gallons of gasoline,59 for an average payback time of about 1.5 years.58 Solar panels require three or four years to pay back their manufacturing emissions.60
The shopping option allows people to reduce their carbon emissions without changing their lifestyles. This is good in that it helps people get started easily. However, it comes from a consumer mentality which may be a barrier to going further. Instead of examining behaviors and changing themselves, shoppers reinforce a comfortable habit of consuming. Isn’t this a big part of why we’re in such a mess to begin with?61 The shopping option might be a step in the right direction, but it means even more stuff; if it changes mindsets, shopping does so only incrementally; and it’s out of reach for the vast majority of humanity.
I chose a no-cost, home-brewed path because I enjoy changing my lifestyle, spending less, and opting out of consumerism. Part of my experiment in low-energy living is to show that anyone can do it, regardless of income level.
I know many people who strive to live sustainable lives. They eat raw vegan diets, use hand-crank juicers, and keep goats for milk and meat.
Yet the raw vegan flies from the US to Asia several times per year, and the goat keeper flies across the continent once per month for her business. As we’ve seen, their flights cast a long, unsustainable shadow over their other efforts. Why do many people who strive to be “green” nonetheless choose to fly frequently?
Part of the answer, I think, is that few people quantify the carbon impacts of their actions, so they don’t realize that their flying habit dominates their emissions. I certainly had no idea until I estimated it myself.
However, I also think that many people are addicted to flying. Even if they knew the impact of their choice to fly, I suspect many would continue doing so. When the goat keeper asked me why I don’t fly, I told her how flying used to completely dominate my emissions. She said, “Well, I have to fly for my job.” The raw vegan told me that buying offsets for her flying is the best she can do “while still fulfilling my adventurous, traveling life purpose.” Humans are good at rationalizing petroculture.
• School drop-offs: The majority of kids in the US arrive by private vehicle, and fewer than 15% walk or bicycle.62 A family living 6 miles from school drives 24 miles per day for drop-offs, or 4,300 miles for a 180-day school year.63 If they drive a typical (25 miles per gallon64) car, they burn 170 gallons of gas. This emits 1,950 kg CO2.
• Heating a house in Los Angeles: Our heater burns about 100 therms per year to heat our 1,400-square-foot house, about ⅓ our annual natural gas consumption. This emits 1,300 kg CO2e per year.
• Drying laundry: One load emits 3.5 kg CO2e (including gas and electricity). A household of four running three loads per week creates annual emissions of 550 kg CO2e.
• Showering: An average shower in the US uses 17 gallons of water.65 To heat that water from 50°F to 107°F requires burning 0.083 therms of natural gas (8,300 Btu). In a year, this emits 380 kg CO2e.
• Refrigerator: My fridge uses 1.5 kWh per day (as measured with a widely available, twenty-dollar electric power meter), emitting 1.4 kg CO2e, or 500 kg CO2e per year. (Imagine all the refrigerators running over the world each emitting 1.4 kg CO2e per day.)
• Pilot light: The two always-on pilot lights in our house (oven and water heater) burn 77 therms of gas in a year, emitting 970 kg CO2e!66 An average pilot light emits a whopping 490 kg CO2e per year.
• Laundry: One load takes 0.2 kWh of electricity. Three loads per week on cold adds up to 30 kg CO2e per year. If we want hot water, we need to burn about 0.15 therms of natural gas to heat the 30 gallons.67 Over one year, this adds up to 300 kg CO2e. Heating the water causes 30 times as much impact as the electricity.
• Computer: I measured a MacBook Air with the power meter; it uses 34 W. I use a laptop about 8 hours per day; this comes to 100 kWh per year. Our home wireless modem uses 6 W continuously (53 kWh per year). Assuming dirty electricity, the total is 140 kg CO2e per year.
• Cell phone charger: With my phone charger plugged in, the power meter reads 0.0 W. This comes to less than 0.4 kg CO2e over the course of a year, possibly much less—insignificant. Let’s go after things that actually matter, like flying in planes.
Once, after a presentation I gave, a woman came up to talk to me, distraught. She told me that while she was very concerned about global warming, she was also a nurse who flew to Africa several times a year to assist in childbirths. She was saving the lives of mothers and children, and this work was deeply meaningful to her—so naturally she felt conflicted about her flying emissions.
I think the answer to situations like these is simple, but also difficult to hear: don’t try to live in two places at once. If you have truly meaningful work overseas, dive into its core by living there. Chances are it will then become meaningful beyond your wildest dreams. As my friend Pancho Ramos-Stierle says, “If you want to serve people, you come and live with the people, and laugh with them, and cry with them, and eat with them.” And if you can’t bring yourself to make this dive, then serve the people in your neighborhood. There are plenty of people to serve within biking distance. It only takes a shift in your thinking to find them. We don’t need to get on airplanes to serve.
High-profile environmental leaders also tend to fly a lot. They feel that their efforts to solve global warming justify their huge footprints, and perhaps they’re right. Still, I can’t help wondering whether they’d be even more effective than they already are, if only they’d walk their talk and lead by example.
In Being the Change, I attempt to present facts as accurately as I can and, in so doing, to raise awareness a little bit. Awareness is the soil out of which change grows. In Chapter 10, I describe some slow-travel alternatives that replaced my own flying habit. It took me about two years to change; I, too, was once addicted to flying.
If you choose flying, go forth and fly. But please don’t pretend your life is sustainable.
The idea behind carbon offsets is to pay some company a modest sum (around $30 for a transatlantic flight) to “offset” the carbon emission of the flight by planting trees.69 Unfortunately, this simply doesn’t help.
First, carbon offset companies, whether well-intentioned or not, can’t guarantee that the trees they plant (assuming they plant any) will be allowed to grow undisturbed for centuries, or that a compensating mass of trees won’t be cut down somewhere else on the planet. How could they? They can’t even guarantee they’ll be in business in two years.
But suppose the offset companies could somehow magically guarantee they’d protect the trees for the next 1,000 years, even in the face of massive development pressure from our exponentially growing population. Even so, the scheme still wouldn’t work.
As mentioned in Chapter 3, a bit less than ⅓ of our cumulative emissions from 1750 to 2011 were from deforestation, while ⅔ were from burning fossil fuels. Suppose we planted so many trees that we reforested the planet to 1750 levels. (It’s hard to see how we could—even a mere 7.5 billion hungry humans destroy forests at a rate of 90,000 acres per day,70 whereas world population is forecast to grow to 11 billion by 2100. But suppose we did.)
By definition, this reforestation would recapture the cumulative emissions from deforestation. But fossil fuel emissions would remain.71 To draw those down as well, we’d need to keep planting trees—three times what we’d need to plant to get back to the 1750 reforestation, which was already implausible.
To look at it another way, all of the trees we could possibly plant are already spoken for by the carbon we’ve already emitted. Suppose we’ve already emitted 100 units of carbon (the numbers here are meant to be illustrative), and that we now stop emitting and reforest as much as we can. Suppose this best-case reforestation captures 30 units. Afterwards, 70 units remain at large.
What if, instead of stopping immediately, we all took a few more flights and bought offsets? Now we’ve emitted, say, 101 units. The offsetting company plants some trees. But these trees would have been planted anyway in the best-case reforestation, which still captures only 30 units. But now 71 units remain at large instead of 70.
If buying carbon offsets locked fossil fuel emissions permanently back underground from whence they came, I’d be all for it. But they don’t.
People often argue that while offsets aren’t perfect, at least they’re doing some good. But are they? Offsets allow people to assuage their guilt and continue flying. In other words, offsets may ultimately increase CO2 emissions.72 We should certainly plant all the forests we can plant, but this should never be an excuse to continue burning fossil fuels.
Despite my efforts to transform my daily actions, I’m still involved in the project of industrial civilization. I use roads, I shop at supermarkets, and when my children are injured, I’m grateful for the emergency room. I also had a few decades of emitting much more than I do now.
Nonetheless, two facts stand out from my ongoing experiment in low-energy living: I was able to make changes to my life that cut my global warming impact by well over a factor of ten, and these changes made me happier. From these facts, I draw the following two conclusions.
First: if everyone—especially those of us who live in affluent societies—made a conscious effort to move toward low-energy living and to change the collective mindset (and the collective infrastructure), we could quickly and painlessly cut global emissions in half, and with that momentum, we’d probably go much deeper. I’m a busy suburbanite with a demanding job, two small kids, and a wife who also works; the fact that I could easily make such deep emissions cuts means that you could likely do so, as well.73 If we all changed together, I’m certain that we’d amaze ourselves with our collective power.
Second: consuming less, and emitting less, makes me happier. Realizing this truth requires a shift in mindset, but it’s a shift more and more people are making. My own experiments, and the similar experiments of many others, send a deeply optimistic message: we don’t need to fear the end of fossil-fueled industrial civilization. Instead, we can embrace this change, and help it come into the world.
