Canada leads the world (but not in a good way)

22. April 2009 · 1 comment · Categories: climate science, reducing emissions · Tags: , , , , , ,

Chris Jones, from the UK Met Office Hadley Centre, presented a paper at EGU 2009 yesterday on The Trillionth Tonne. The analysis shows that the key driver of temperature change is the total cumulative amount of carbon emissions. To keep below the 2°C global average temperature rise generally regarded as the threshold for preventing dangerous warming, we need to keep total cumulative emissions below a trillion tonnes. And the world is already halfway there.

Which is why the latest news about Canada’s carbon emissions are so embarrassing. Canada is now top among the G8 nations for emissions growth. Let’s look at the numbers: 747 megatonnes in 2007, up from 592 megatonnes in 1990. Using the figures in the Environment Canada report, I calculated the Canada has emitted over 12 gigatonnes since 1990. That’s 12 billion tonnes. So, in 17 years we burnt though more than 1.2% of the entire world’s total budget of carbon emissions. A total budget that has to last from the dawn of industrialization to the point at which the whole world become carbon-neutral. Oh, and Canada has 0.5% of the world’s population.

Disclaimer: I have to check whether the Hadley Centre’s target is 1 trillion tonnes of CO2-equivalent, or 1 trillion tonnes of Carbon (they are different!). The EnvCanada report numbers refer to the former.

Update: I checked with Chris, and as I feared, I got the wrong units – it’s a trillion tonnes of carbon. The conversion factor is about 3.66, so that gives us about 3.66 trillion tonnes of carbon dioxide to play with. [Note: Emissions targets are usually phrased in terms of “Carbon dioxide equivalent”, which is a bit hard to calculate as different greenhouse gases have both different molecular weights and different warming factors].

So my revised figures are that Canada burnt through only about 0.33% of the world’s total budget in the last 17 years. Which looks a little better, until you consider:

  • by population, that’s 2/3 of Canada’s entire share. 
  • Using the cumulative totals from 1900-2002. plus the figures for the more recent years from the Environment Canada report (and assuming 2008 was similar to 2007) we’ve emitted 27 gigatonnes of CO2 since 1900. Which is about 0.73% of the world’s budget, or about 147% of our fair share per head. 
  • By population, our fair share of the world’s budget is about 18 gigatonnes CO2 (=5 gigatonnes Carbon). We’d burnt through that by 1997. Everything since then is someone else’s share.

Computers have big lifecycle footprints

30. March 2009 · 2 comments · Categories: greentech, reducing emissions · Tags: ,

Well, here’s an interesting analysis of the lifecycle emissions of a computer. Turns out that computers require something like ten times their weight in fossil fuels to manufacture. Which is an order of magnitude higher than other durable goods, like cars and fridges, which only require about their own weight in fuel to manufacture. Oh, and the flat screen display accounts for the majority of it.

Okay, so I’ll concede that my computer is an order of magnitude more useful to me than a fridge (which after all, only does one thing). But it does mean that if we focus only on power consumption during use, we might be missing the biggest savings opportunities. 

The analysis is from the book Computers and the Environment, edited by Kuehr and Williams, and here’s a brief review.

Green Internet startups

25. March 2009 · 1 comment · Categories: greentech · Tags: ,

Having ranted yesterday about how discussions about our personal carbon footprints are a distraction, I now feel obliged to raise an exception. If we’re talking about how to use our software expertise to support personal footprint reduction on a grander scale, I’m all for it. Along those lines, here’s a list of ten green Internet startups – companies looking to leverage Internet technology, to support ‘greening’ initiatives. These ten were presented at a conference in SF yesterday called Green:Net09, and a panel of judges selected a winner – presumably the company most likely to succeed. The judges picked WattBot, while the audience favourite was FarmsReach.

Distracted by the footprints

24. March 2009 · 1 comment · Categories: advocacy, philosophy, politics · Tags: , , , ,

At many discussions about the climate crisis that I’ve had with professional colleagues, the conversation inevitably turns to how we (as individuals) can make a difference by reducing our personal carbon emissions. So sure, our personal choices matter. And we shouldn’t stop thinking about them. And there is plenty of advice out there on how to green your home, and how to make good shopping decisions, and so on. Actually, there is way too much advice out there on how to live a greener life. It’s overwhelming. And plenty of it is contradictory. Which leads to two unfortunate messages: (1) we’re supposed to fix global warming through our individual personal choices and (2) this is incredibly hard because there is so much information to process to do it right.

The climate crisis is huge, and systemic. It cannot be solved through voluntary personal lifestyle choices; it needs systemic changes throughout society as a whole. As Bill McKibben says:

“the number one thing is to organize politically; number two, do some political organizing; number three, get together with your neighbors and organize; and then if you have energy left over from all of that, change the light bulb.”

Now, part of getting politically organized is getting educated. Another part is connecting with people. We computer scientists are generally not very good at political action, but we are remarkably good at inventing tools that allow people to get connected. And we’re good at inventing tools for managing, searching and visualizing information, which helps with the ‘getting educated’ part and the ‘persuading others’ part.

So, I don’t want to have more conversations about reducing our personal carbon footprints. I want to have conversations about how we can apply our expertise as computer scientists and software engineers in new and creative ways. Instead of thinking about your footprint, think about your delta (okay, I might need a better name for it): what expertise and skills do you have that most others don’t, and how can they be applied to good effect to help?