I just got a CO2 meter and checked the levels in my house and went down a rabbit hole trying to address the issue. Apparently it would take 249 areca palms to offset the carbon RESPIRATION of one adult.
So okay 249 trees just for me to breathe, not to mention the rest of the bad things we all do.
So how can this math ever balance? 249 trees just to break even seems like an impossible number. Then all the flights I have been on, miles driven, etc.
I feel like that’s… Way too many trees. Is it hopeless or am I missing something?
You’re not supposed to. It is a marketing ploy from oil and gas companies to shift the blame from corporations to individuals for their pollution.
The oil and gas companies and their “environmentalist” buddies.
We could have prevented climate change with nuclear power in the 1990s.
Even without solar and wind (they were too expensive at the time) or carbon taxes, Sweden and France managed to get emissions down to 5 tons per capita with old nuclear and hydro technology. If all rich countries had done the same thing, climate change would have been a non-issue.
We can still solve it today with today’s technologies: solar, wind and battery technology has evolved and become affordable. Carbon taxes are politically feasible. And old nuclear technology is becoming more acceptable and gearing up.
Sure, try to help by reducing your energy use where possible and investing in things like home insulation and energy efficient heating and transportation.
But the actual big things that need to be done can only be done by politicians, to force economies to change.
Even without solar and wind (they were too expensive at the time)
This is true and I’m not disputing this fact, but had the oil companies not interfered with and killed off any attempts at alternative energy sources, things may have been quite different.
carbon taxes are politically feasible
Not in the United States, they’re not. I actually work with politicians as a climate lobbyist and carbon taxes are a complete non-starter.
Batteries are not quite there yet. It’s still quite a large investment to build massive batteries that can help small to medium towns for short periods of time. As an EE I’m hoping we make a breakthrough soon that will allow us to increase their energy density. Either that or move to different liquid fuels, which have an energy density advantage.
Yeah holy shit I can’t believe that people are braking their head about this …
I don’t know is mistype or not, but I find that both “braking” their heads and “breaking” their heads work in this context.
Breathing does not create Carbon, it is only transformed.
There are basically 2 pools of carbon. The carbon already in circulation in the athmosphere, plants, animals and so on, roaming at the surface. That Carbon can be CO2, or other mollecules, but there is always a fixed amount. You breathing is simply borrowing the carbon for a bit and putting it out again in the air when exhaling.
The second pool is carbon locked away in the ground, as coal, oil and whatnot. That carbon is OLD and is not supposed to be in the first pool. When you burn oil, the carbon from the 2nd pool ends up in the 1st one. You cannot really offset it because even planting trees just transforms it as wood for a bit, but if the tree burns or rots, the carbon goes back in the air. The only option long term is to send the carbon back in a locked state in the second pool.
But for you, just reduce the amount of carbon you move from pool 2 to pool 1 to help the earth. Cut on oil, gas, coal as much as you can. The rest is basically irrelevant.
You can compare it to the water cycle. You are at a lake with a pump, and pump the water from the lake back into the lake. You can keep going forever and will not cause the lakes to rise since the water is pumped from there anyway. BUT, if a mega corporation starts pumping from underground sources and dumping it in that lake, it would overflow for sure. And they would blame you for all the water you are pumping.
Is there any way to bring carbon from pool 1 into 2? Or we already fucked up and have to live with it now?
Re trees: It follows that growing some trees doesn’t help much, but growing a forest on otherwise bare land will act as a carbon sink as long as it’s not cut down - dead trees will be replaced without human intervention
There’s a lot of greenery on Earth - seaweeds recycle a huge amount of CO2, as are all the plants we use and eat. It would be completely enough, especially as we keep killing off all the other animals that produce CO2.
It’s just unfortunate that we’re destroying the oceans too, and agriculture is a heavy industry with more polution. And while we kill off the harmless or useful wild animals, we replace them with livestock, and you know where that is going.
As individuals, we really can’t do much in this regard. I guess you can do more biking instead of driving, reusing older products, buying local, stuff like that, but this really won’t make a dent when industries keep using the dirtiest possible processes to save a cent, or if nuclear power keeps being lobbied out.
Individual guilt is never gonna beat organized engineering.
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A quick Google search says there are 3 trillion trees on Earth. So that’s 500 trees per person but as mentioned before things like algae and other sources make up more.
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The carbon from your breathing is carbon neutral since all the carbon in your body comes from food which comes ultimately comes from plants. However the carbon dioxide used to produce and transport your food is where the excess comes from.
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If you want to minimize your carbon footprint it’s more about understanding which behaviors contribute the most. Eg an economy flight from the US to Europe is like 1.5 tons of CO2. That’s like years of respiration.
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Of course the problem is hard to solve as an individual. Maybe there just needs to be assignable liability for certain activities and the correct legal and economic system setup to optimize better for ecological issues.
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Become a vegan activist and if you convince a few people to go vegan you can actually become carbon negative.
Also plant some trees.
CO meter for sure, but a CO2 meter? It’s actually a good idea to have CO alarms in your house if using natural gas powered appliances. However CO2 is only a concern if you’re in a hermetically sealed environment like a submarine or space ship. I suppose it could be useful to check proper ventilation in the home, but normally you can just open a window.
Anyway the Earth has a carbon cycle, in other words it filters natural CO2 emissions through environmental processes. The problem is the amount added by industry is more than the natural carbon cycle can process. So levels are steadily increasing.
When we talk about zero carbon footprint we mean sources from industry like driving gasoline powered cars, generation of electricity, and production of consumer goods. A good amount already comes from natural processes like volcanos and erosion so we don’t actually need a zero carbon footprint, just need it low enough to avoid overwhelming the natural cycle.
At a personal level it would be just about impossible to have a zero carbon footprint. If you had a solar and wind powered home off-grid and used it to charge an electric car you could be well below average. However any consumer goods you use put carbon in the air to produce them. Even if you went full native you’d still be putting carbon in the air burning wood and candles.
Actually the CO2 meter showed levels in my home during the day at 1350 (I think over 1000 is bad - 10% cognitive decline I think occurs at 1500) and in the morning over 2100 in my bedroom! The AC turns off and the CO2 just builds up I guess.
I did the research to see if any amount of houseplants could offset it (nope), but yes, opening a window is exactly the solution. Problem is I live in Florida and it is way too hot to do that. So I compromised and turned on a bathroom vent all day and it is keeping the levels to around 800 per day. It basically is slowly sucking air through the not perfectly sealed home and expelling it through the roof.
But I recognize now my AC will have to work harder to cool the incoming air and make my home less efficient, thus doing worse overall. Happily we have a nuclear power plant here but still.
Most people use CO2 meter at home to measure air quality. If you’re in room that is not well ventilated, depending on the size of the room, CO2 will reach pretty high levels within minutes. Unless it’s really bad, it’s not high enough to kill you (which is why people have CO detectors) but spending long time in the environment (hours) might cause issues with how well you can focus, trigger headache or migraine, cause tiredness if this is your bedroom, etc…
Just try to act responsibly. Don’t drive if you don’t have to, recycle, start a compost heap. If you spend all day worrying about the “carbon footprint” of your own breathing then you’ll just end up driving yourself crazy and blowing all your money on online scams
Surely this is satire?
Overpopulation is an issue that has to be aknowledged but the earth would be able to sustain a lot more people if we wouldn’t pollute as much.
Net zero is less of a number and more like a notion. Is existing in our environment with the least climatic influence a good thing? One way to achieve that would be lethal pandemic. We don’t know what our true impact is and may never know. Net zero in practical terms means reducing energy consumption and pollution. It inevitably implies reducing the population and finding an alternative to capitalism. We may have to revert to a more primative life whether we want to or not.
It’s not going to happen.
