Measuring your carbon footprint? There's no app for that
- Reference: 1631690112
- News link: https://www.theregister.co.uk/2021/09/15/carbon_footprint_apps/
- Source link:
I thought that sounded like a good enough offer that I was willing to endure a modestly nosey survey that gathered information about my lifestyle, income, and personal habits. The result was an indication that my footprint was in the "high" range.
I found that a little surprising. I did fly a lot, back when that was still a thing. But I don't have a car, walk and bike everywhere, use renewably generated electricity, and am vegetarian.
[1]
The app informed me that 70 per cent of my CO 2 emissions came from an area defined simply as "purchases".
[2]
[3]
Uh … ok? I tapped on that, to see if it might be broken down in any meaningful way, only to find that my rating was an estimate drawn from averages that may or may not have reflected my personal circumstances.
I'd like to believe that I tread lightly on the environment, though I know as a middle-class Australian that's unlikely to be the case. In the absence of any meaningful information, how can I make changes? I could follow the app's suggestions – though these seem to be more broad brushstrokes than highly targeted activities.
[4]
That leaves me little wiser than before I launched the app.
[5]The web was done right the first time. An ancient 3D banana shows Microsoft does a lot right, too
[6]Great reset? More like Fake Reset: Leaders need a reality check if they think their best staff will give up hybrid work
[7]Restoring your privacy costs money, which makes it a marker of class
It's not really the app's fault. It's doing the best it can to offer advice in an environment that almost completely lacks auditability, transparency, or solid sources of data.
When I buy an apple at the supermarket, I have no idea how much carbon was burnt bringing it to me, nor do I have any obvious way to learn this. That's [8]broadly true for almost everything – although here in Australia automakers are required by law to let you know how many litres of petrol it will burn to take you 100 kilometres, and appliances are rated by energy consumption.
We all have good reason to doubt even those ratings, thanks to the [9]Dieselgate scandal sparked by Volkswagen nobbling its emission-measurement software
that, and Big Oil's [10]PR campaign to distract us with personal carbon footprints – ed.
Why don't we have proper transparency of emissions associated with, well, everything?
[11]
If I know that I need a new smartphone, how can I weigh out the relative merits of an iPhone or Galaxy or whatever [12]against the cost to the environment? What about [13]all those cloud services I consume directly through web sites I maintain, or indirectly, through services I employ? All of it adds up – and that's precisely why we need to find a way to add it all up.
It's not so much that this is impossible – it's just that we don't yet think in these terms even though it's clear we need to.
We account for every penny spent and earned and pour the results into apps that inform our everyday decisions, but we don't yet have any carbon dioxide on our balance sheets. Organisations [14]talk big about their plans for carbon neutrality, but we need to break that down into atomic detail, so that every act of creation or consumption carries with it a planetary 'price tag'. That way, we can know how we're traveling.
Then, perhaps, we can have apps on our devices that have access to a rich enough depth of insight to allows us to monitor and manage our own activities, informing tiny changes in our choices. When aggregated in the actions of billions, those changes can make a big difference.
Properly accounting for CO 2 will require an effort. Business will almost certainly complain (disingenuously) that it is an expensive effort. But it would be far outweighed by the benefits.
We always hear that 'you can't change what you don't measure'.
So let's measure – and change. ®
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[1] https://pubads.g.doubleclick.net/gampad/jump?co=1&iu=/6978/reg_software/applications&sz=300x50%7C300x100%7C300x250%7C300x251%7C300x252%7C300x600%7C300x601&tile=2&c=2YUHEYSKVjAcx1mviHQ3J9AAAAIg&t=ct%3Dns%26unitnum%3D2%26raptor%3Dcondor%26pos%3Dtop%26test%3D0
[2] https://pubads.g.doubleclick.net/gampad/jump?co=1&iu=/6978/reg_software/applications&sz=300x50%7C300x100%7C300x250%7C300x251%7C300x252%7C300x600%7C300x601&tile=4&c=44YUHEYSKVjAcx1mviHQ3J9AAAAIg&t=ct%3Dns%26unitnum%3D4%26raptor%3Dfalcon%26pos%3Dmid%26test%3D0
[3] https://pubads.g.doubleclick.net/gampad/jump?co=1&iu=/6978/reg_software/applications&sz=300x50%7C300x100%7C300x250%7C300x251%7C300x252%7C300x600%7C300x601&tile=3&c=33YUHEYSKVjAcx1mviHQ3J9AAAAIg&t=ct%3Dns%26unitnum%3D3%26raptor%3Deagle%26pos%3Dmid%26test%3D0
[4] https://pubads.g.doubleclick.net/gampad/jump?co=1&iu=/6978/reg_software/applications&sz=300x50%7C300x100%7C300x250%7C300x251%7C300x252%7C300x600%7C300x601&tile=4&c=44YUHEYSKVjAcx1mviHQ3J9AAAAIg&t=ct%3Dns%26unitnum%3D4%26raptor%3Dfalcon%26pos%3Dmid%26test%3D0
[5] https://www.theregister.com/2021/08/11/column_cyberbanana_windows/
[6] https://www.theregister.com/2021/07/28/the_fake_reset/
[7] https://www.theregister.com/2021/07/15/privacy_costs_money/
[8] https://www.theregister.com/2021/02/26/eu_climate_supercomputer/
[9] https://www.theregister.com/2015/09/19/volkswagen_pollution_cheat_claims_epa/
[10] https://clear.ucdavis.edu/blog/big-oil-distracts-their-carbon-footprint-tricking-you-focus-yours
[11] https://pubads.g.doubleclick.net/gampad/jump?co=1&iu=/6978/reg_software/applications&sz=300x50%7C300x100%7C300x250%7C300x251%7C300x252%7C300x600%7C300x601&tile=3&c=33YUHEYSKVjAcx1mviHQ3J9AAAAIg&t=ct%3Dns%26unitnum%3D3%26raptor%3Deagle%26pos%3Dmid%26test%3D0
[12] https://www.theregister.com/2021/06/22/tech_carbon_emissions_report/
[13] https://www.theregister.com/2021/07/01/amazon_carbon_footprint/
[14] https://www.theregister.com/2020/01/17/microsoft_carbon_removal/
[15] https://whitepapers.theregister.com/
Boulder Colorado has had a [1]beach for years.
If all the ice in the world melted, sea level would not rise 5,328 feet. Boulder's safe.
[1] https://www.google.com/maps/place/Sugarloaf+Mountain/@40.0721683,-105.2257912,682m/data=!3m1!1e3!4m13!1m7!3m6!1s0x876b8d4e278dafd3:0xc8393b7ca01b8058!2sBoulder,+CO!3b1!8m2!3d40.0149856!4d-105.2705456!3m4!1s0x876bc26df818ef2f:0xedd02b237bf51602!8m2!3d40.0266286!4d-105.4186249
I love Big Brother
'totalitarian green government' file that under be careful what you wish for.
Within limits, more CO2 would be better than less
The one thing that marks the climate debate is incompetence and oversimplification. CO2 is not the control knob for the Earth's thermostat to regulate its average temperature.
Not only that, the average temperature is a bonkers concept. Depending on who you ask, something around 15 °C is deemed ideal. Well I can tell you, if the world were to be uniformly at that temperature, the icecaps would melt and things would be far from ideal. Likewise if it were -50 °C at the poles and +70°C around the equator in a way that would also average out to 15 °C. On Earth we have thirty different climate types. The concept of an average temperature is a gross oversimplification.
Yes, the world is warming, and yes, humans play a role in that, but it is nowhere near an issue that requires action. Still more people die of cold every year than of heat. the higher CO2 levels have significantly greened the planet according to NASA and crop yields break record after record every year. CO2 is plant food!
Re: Within limits, more CO2 would be better than less
>> Yes, the world is warming, and yes, humans play a role in that, but it is nowhere near an issue that requires action.
There is no longer any controversy that climate change is being driven by burning fossil fuels, and that it is a serious threat to our civilisation. The fact that there are still people who seem to think these facts are in some way questionable shows the tremendous efficiency of the secretive campaigns run by the oil industry to promote the view that this is something we don't need to worry about.
Climate science is difficult, and the maths is hard, but average temperature as a dashboard indicator for what is going wrong has the benefit of being a single metric that most people can understand. The fact that nowhere on earth is "average temperature" most of the time doesn't make it a "bonkers concept". It is a good proxy for the increasing amounts of thermal energy driving the weather system to become more chaotic and less predictable.
https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2015/jul/08/exxon-climate-change-1981-climate-denier-funding
https://www.theguardian.com/environment/climate-consensus-97-per-cent/2018/sep/19/shell-and-exxons-secret-1980s-climate-change-warnings
Re: Within limits, more CO2 would be better than less
There is no longer any controversy that climate change is being driven by burning fossil fuels,
WRONG.
* CO2 is a lousy greenhouse gas. it does NOT in any significant way affect the amount of black body radiation sent out into space, which is the way the earth cools at night. Its IR absorption spectrum excludes the energies that correspond to ACTUAL TEMPERATURES FOUND ON EARTH.
* CO2 is only 0.04% of the atmosphere and is at equilibrium both chemically AND biologically. Greatly increasing its production (or depletion) rate will generally have an insignificant effect on the equilibrium concentration. Chem 101.
* CO2 concentration in the atmosphere varies due to temperature because the gas solubility in water varies THE SAME WAY. In other words, when it is colder, there is more CO2 in bodies of water, and less in the air, because the equilibrium reaction shifted due to the temperature of the water (and not the other way around). Soda goes flat faster when the liquid gets warm for this very reason.
* WATER, the "other greenhouse gas", absorbs a SIGNIFICANT amount of black body radiation that would otherwise cool the earth, keeping that energy in the atmosphere (and causing a 'greenhouse effect').
and so on
Hardly "settled".
(As for an app that actually helps you to lower your personal costs of fuel and electricity, that might actually be HELPFUL)
Re: Within limits, more CO2 would be better than less
CO2 is plant food!
I understand that greenhouse farmers sometimes pump CO2 into their greenhouses for this reason.
It's also part of 'biological equilbrium'.
* CO2 concentration in the atmosphere goes up due to increased production rate of C02 by humans
* plant and algae growth is stimulated
* CO2 depletion rate increases due to additional plant growth
* CO2 stabilizes at a level just slightly higher than before.
Also worth noting that higher earth temperature ALSO causes elevated CO2 levels, since less gas can be dissolved in warmer water. I would think that the entire ocean's dumping of dissolved CO2 and carbonates through "effervescence" just might dwarf anything humans could due, because a natural temperature cycle caused an increase in oceanic temperature. Then plants grow faster, etc.
These kinds of principles are generally taught in college chem classes. Ever do a phosphate titration?
https://ecoscore.be/en/info/ecoscore/co2
Worth reading.
Does not work
Like most things in life chanting the carbon footprint mantra is an exercise in self-deception. I have accumulated a massive carbon footprint just to get here. The carbon footprint required to build roads on which and the car in which I try to use less petrol similarly is massive. We'd better start emulating Fred Flintstone's family saloon on unpaved tracks to make a difference.
Individuals doing little things around the house ...
... aren't going to affect the Earth's climate, regardless of what your phone might tell you.
It is industry that will have to change, and on a global level. Which isn't going to happen. Dollars say no.
And even then I'm not entirely convinced it would make much difference. The climate will do what the climate will do, and I seriously doubt us puny humans can do anything about it over the long haul.
If every government passed laws requiring every manufacturer to calculate and publish a 'carbon value' for every product and that was able to be input to an app, I doubt that many people would bother to do it fully and correctly and that by the time the majority of products finally had their carbon values calculated and published, Boulder Colorado would have a beach.
Apps would only make those that could be bothered with them, feel better that they are doing what they can but it is not an answer.
Possibly the only answer is disaster or totalitarian green government, or, all manufacturers and consumers to care about the environment rather than profits or convenience.
Personally I think disaster is the odds on favourite to cross the finishing line first.