1.5 degrees and me

Over the past year or so, there has been much ado about whether we can and should aim to keep the global temperature rise to 1.5 or 2 degrees Celsius. In daily life, half a degree isn’t even enough to help decide whether or not to put on a sweater to go outside. But in the context of global climate change, an average global temperature rise of an extra half a degree is a big deal. It’s the difference between a long drought season or a short one, between whether homes or communities flood or not, between the existence and disappearance of entire small island states. It means a difference of 10 cm of global sea rise, and twice as many insects, plants and vertebrates being lost.

(for the techy version of this story, see the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC)’s Special Report on Global Warming of 1.5 degrees; for a shorter read, check out this article in The Guardian). 

This brings up some big questions. Can we make changes fast enough to head off the worst disasters? Who should make which changes? Who’s responsible?

A recent report called 1.5-Degree Lifestyles: Targets and options for reducing lifestyle carbon footprints provides some important insight. It looks at GHG emissions from the perspective of people’s carbon footprints, as individuals. This is different from other calculations, including the production-based ones that are used when countries commit to emissions targets in international agreements. Production-based national calculations include all the emissions produced within the borders of a country, including everything that is exported (including oil and gas exports, for example). They don’t include emissions from what is imported (food, clothes, cars, consumer goods etc.). Lifestyle footprints calculate based on what an average citizen in a given country consumes, including imported products.

The authors focused their research on Finland, Japan, India, China and Brazil. They assessed lifestyle carbon footprints in those five countries based on aspects of daily living including food, housing, mobility, consumer goods, leisure and services. The current footprints of the five countries they assess are, as you might guess, extremely different:

Finland	10.4
Japan	7.6
China	4.2
Brazil	2.8
India	2.0

I’m betting that footprints in Canada are higher than Finland’s, and that France is somewhere near Japan.  This graph provides the breakdown for different types of consumption in the five countries, with reduction targets up to 2050:

The study establishes global targets for lifestyle carbon footprints — meaning a target estimated to keep global warming below 1.5 degrees,  in which each person on the planet would have the same carbon footprint. The proposed targets are 2.5 tonnes of CO₂ equivalent per person in 2030, and 0.7 tonnes by 2050. 

It then examines current consumption patterns and their impacts, and evaluates the potential of low-carbon lifestyle options. After assessing a long list of carbon-emitting activities, the research showed that areas which would yield the greatest benefit are reducing fossil-fuel based energy, car use and air travel, and consumption of meat and dairy. The most promising areas for reduction differ by country according to things like how electricity is produced (renewables or nuclear are low in CO₂; coal and oil are high) and diets (India wins in this area, with its dominantly vegetarian diet).

The study results confirm what others have been saying in different ways for a while: we really do need to change everything. Clearly, the biggest need for change is for people in industrialized countries like mine. It’s sobering to notice the huge difference between emissions in Finland and India, in every single category.

Under the assumption that among other categories, mobility emissions in Finland must be similar to Canada’s, I did some back-of-the envelope calculations about my own emissions, and swallowed hard. 

In Finland, where mobility contributes a little over a quarter of their carbon footprint, the average person drives 11 200 km per year and travels about 2 180 km by air. We don’t own a car, but I roughly calculated our car rentals for weekend and holiday trips this year and came out to 8040 km of car travel (emitting 2.5 tonnes of CO2). I could justify cutting that number since most of it was with our family, but in any case my car travel numbers pale in comparison to the two round trip flights on my docket for this year (Montreal to Montpellier and Barcelona to Beirut). They total 18 270 km and a whopping 3.2 tonnes of CO2e ¹ . Redoing the estimates for our last year in Canada, we travelled some 5210 km by car, emitting 1.6 tonnes of CO2. My flight total was 19 122 km (3.3 tonnes of C02e) for five flights (Toronto twice, Winnipeg, New York and Rome) all related to work. 11 000 kms of train travel, shuttling between Montreal and Toronto or Ottawa, added another .46 tonnes of CO2.²

If you skipped that number-laden paragraph and the footnotes, I get it! Here’s the point: my transportation emissions are waaay higher than the average Finn’s (twice as many kilometres, and probably four times as many emissions) – which are already the highest in this study and need to be reduced. Clearly, just avoiding long-distance flights would have the greatest impact for me.  I didn’t attempt calculations beyond transportation, but I’m pretty sure that living space is my next highest emitter. I’ve already been making efforts to reduce my pretty limited red meat consumption, and I do think there’s a role for sustainably-raised meats in our diets — but that’s a story for another post. 

A quick and dirty way to assess your overall carbon footprint is here: https://www.footprintcalculator.org/. I was told that my personal overshoot day is April 2! Although I’m under no illusions that it erases their impact, most of these emissions were ‘offset’ with credits purchased from Planetair or other reputable emissions offsetters.

I bring this down to myself because I believe that we can only change systems when we change ourselves, and that we have responsibilities as individuals. But don’t get me wrong : I know that the level of cultural and consumption reductions needed, as described in this study, can’t be done by individual consumers alone. It needs collaboration by all, including governments and the private sector – including by making cities more dense yet liveable, public transportation more accessible, energy sources more renewable and putting a price on pollution generally, including a carbon tax. It will also require increasing carbon sinks like forests, prairies and agricultural land. ³

The authors of the 1.5 Degree Lifestyle report underline this point and the last words (bold added) goes to them:

‘Shifts in consumption modes, substitution of products to improve efficiency and reduction of physical consumption amounts while maintaining quality of life can only be achieved through a combination of system-wide changes and a groundswell of action from individuals and households.’

1. CO₂ equivalent or CO2e, is a measure used to compare the emissions from various greenhouse gases (such as methane) on the basis of their global warming potential, by converting amounts of other gases to the equivalent amount of carbon dioxide with the same global warming potential.
2. Calculations for the climate impacts of air travel vary widely in the many available calculators, mostly depending on whether the ‘radiative forcing’ impacts of nitrogen oxide emissions are included. While research is ongoing on this, I was impressed by the transparency and rigour of the Myclimate.org flight calculator (they explain their methodology here) and used it for my calculations. This makes them nearly twice as high as the ones used by the International Civil Aviation Organization, which unfortunately does not seem to me to be complete, nor to be applying the precautionary principle in its calculation rationale.
3. The 1.5 Degree Lifestyle report includes scenarios for ‘negative emissions technologies’ like the controversial carbon capture and storage techniques but not natural carbon sinks, for some reason.