Argument with How Bad Are Bananas—Or Why You Cannot Figure Out Carbon Footprint

Let’s Put an End to this Distraction

Note: This post also appears on my newsletter Arguments with Books.

---

The book How Bad Are Bananas: The Carbon Footprint of Everything by Mike Berners-Lee amounts to nothing more than an astonishing admission of the total futility of measuring carbon footprint. Urged to read this book by followers on Intertwine (my climate change newsletter) and readers on Medium, I took up the challenge. I am underwhelmed.

I have to start by giving Berners-Lee credit for his honesty and clarity in the book. He seems to understand the complexity of calculating a true “carbon footprint,” which most people seem to not understand. “I hope that by the time you have read [this book] you will have gained such a sense of where carbon impacts come from that you will be able to make a reasonable guestimate of the footprint of… everything that you come across. It won’t be exact, but I hope you’ll at least be able to get the number of zeros right most of the time.” Which is to say: It is impossible to calculate so hopefully guessing the orders of magnitude will help.

The argument seems to be that since the differences in different activities appear to be enormous, understanding the comparative enormity of each can help you choose high-impact moves. This example he provides is excellent:

“A friend recently asked how he should dry his hands to reduce his carbon footprint—with a paper towel or with an electric hand dryer. The same person flies across the Atlantic literally dozens of times a year. A sense of scale is required here. The flying is tens of thousands of times more important than the hand drying. So my friend was simply distracting himself from the issue.”

This is pretty much the case I have been making on carbon footprint overall—it is a distraction from the really big problems and really big commitments we could make to solve the climate change problem. While Berners-Lee sees the order of magnitude differences between different personal activities, he has missed completely the even larger orders of magnitude of committing our employment and our businesses to the transformation of the economy, rather than the paltry gazing at our own navels and worrying about whether or not to take an airplane somewhere. Yet that is exactly what Berners-Lee is trying to enable. “This book is here to help you pick your battles." In other words, it is to enable navel-gazing. Sure, it is better to look at air travel over hand dryers, but you are still avoiding the real contribution you could make.

You Cannot Manage Your Carbon Footprint

The great business management guru Peter Drucker said that what gets measured gets managed. The converse is also true. What you cannot measure, you cannot manage. And no one can measure carbon footprint. Berners-Lee states it with the utmost clarity: “The carbon footprint, as I have defined it, is the climate change metric that we need to be looking at. The problem is that it is also impossible to measure.”

What is astonishing to me is that despite his insight into the impossibility of measuring carbon footprint, Berners-Lee argues that this gross level of measurement is good enough… “they will do…” he says. “Real footprints are the essential measure, and nothing short of them will do. The level of accuracy that I have described is good enough to separate out the flying from the hand drying.” That level of accuracy is about an order of magnitude. He says that 5.5 lbs of carbon dioxide, for example, is "almost certainly between 2 and 20 lbs." Which is to say, "Who knows?" Rather than see the flaw in his logic, he insists that personal choices about carbon are the answer and that grossly erroneous numbers are good enough to make decisions. I disagree and here is why.

The 10-ton Lifestyle

The book was written in 2011 and Berners-Lee indicates that the average American carbon footprint at that time was 24 tons per year. He then promotes the idea of a 10-ton lifestyle, which for Americans would represent a 65% reduction in carbon footprint on average. He claims you can apply those tons to each month, and then compare your activities to the impact. “A short car commute, a daily cheeseburger, and some wasteful lighting habits could easily use up a quarter of the 10-ton budget,” he says. But wait a minute… didn’t you just tell me that the actual impact of these activities is impossible to measure and might be as much ten times off the number you use? Think about that. If they are ten times less, these activities use 2.5% of the annual 10-ton budget. If they are ten times more, you’ve eliminated your entire carbon footprint for the next 2.5 years. I ask you: How can that possibly provide you with a way to make a decision?

Plus, there is a huge problem with the 10-ton lifestyle. While Americans would experience that as a reduction in their current lifestyle, most of the world would enjoy it as a huge lifestyle improvement. The ambitions of most societies are toward lifestyle improvements, not toward retrenchment. In other words, they aspire to use more energy and improve their day-to-day lives—and today, that means more carbon. As they do so, their average carbon footprints will also go up, and that will be catastrophic. Berners-Lee even admits this: “If everyone went in for 10-ton living all over the globe, emissions would skyrocket by 40 percent.” This is hardly a solution.

In 2021, the global per capita carbon footprint was 4.69 metric tons. According to Berners-Lee, the UK at the time had a goal of getting people to 3 tons per person per year. Globally speaking, a reduction to 3 tons per person annually is a 36% reduction in total emissions. Keep in mind that the International Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) indicates that we need to cut emissions by 76% to prevent global warming from becoming catastrophic and irreversible. To achieve that, the global per capita carbon footprint would have to go from 4.69 metric tons to 1.09 metric tons. Here's what Berners-Lee says about achieving the more modest reduction to a 3-ton lifestyle. “Ultimately, though, it’s virtually impossible for an individual in the developed world to get down to a 3-ton lifestyle anytime soon. That kind of cut requires the whole economy to be made greener.” (emphasis added). There is absolutely no way to get to 1.09 metric tons without greening the economy.

And that is the point. Here we have the most rigorous attempt I have seen to measure carbon footprint, and the conclusions he makes are clear:

• Meaningful measurement of individual carbon footprint is impossible, so ballpark estimates varying by an order of magnitude or more will have to do.

• There’s no way to know for sure if your lifestyle changes are having an impact.

• It is almost certain that those changes are paltry in the big scheme of things.

• The only way we can get where we need to go is by greening the economy, not personal initiatives.

Let’s Get Greening the Economy

The underlying reason for all this is clear—carbon footprint does not belong to individuals or individual behaviors. Carbon footprint is appropriately measured for a society or an economy as a whole. One cannot break it down to individual behavior. For individuals, you cannot get a starting point, you cannot get a current measure, so you cannot know whether you have been successful or not, what tactics or strategies are working, or where you are going. Rather, carbon footprint on an individual level is a meaningless measure. Only solutions that will change at the societal and macroeconomic levels make sense.

Economies, on the other hand, can be measured and managed. We know how much carbon a nation emits, and we know how much carbon comes from operating a coal-burning power plant, a steel mill, a cement plant, an airplane, and a car. Fixing those sources of carbon so that we can do what we need to do economically is imminently possible, and requires the best work of everyone—far beyond personal footprint management. Solving these problems, no matter how much you fly or commute in your car, will have far more impact on climate change than any individual lifestyle decision you may make. On the other hand, choosing to avoid such work, which is also a lifestyle decision, means that you are unwilling to contribute your best efforts to the real solutions that are needed to green the economy. As I described here, the US today has at least 100,000 unfilled jobs that can contribute to the greening of the economy—including electricians to install solar, battery chemistry researchers, marketers and salespeople, supply chain managers for products and services that are building the new green economy, and so on. An open job means the work is not getting done, and that is slowing down our transition to the green economy we all need.

Thanks to Mike Berners-Lee for doing the hard and detailed work attempting to measure carbon footprint, and thanks to him for his forthrightness about the impossibility of it. I’d like to think that a careful read of this book would put an end to this strange focus and lead more creative, intelligent, and powerful people to do the things that matter. The future of human society on earth depends on it.

Anthony Signorelli

Get my free newsletter Intertwine: Living Better in a Worsening World here.

Free Newsletters by Anthony

Get my free newsletter Write On here! It is writers, writing, and the business of writing.

Get my free newsletter Intertwine: Living Better in a Worsening World here.

Get my free newsletter Arguments with Book here.

Get my free newsletter Tony on Business here.

Get my free newsletter Soul Food: Poems by Anthony here.

Books by Anthony

To read more of my original work, try my books! All are on Amazon and published by various small presses.

What Is Liberalism?—Toward an American Political Philosophy

Speculations on Postcapitalism: How Digitalization Is Disrupting Everything We Know About Modern Civilization

The Great Mechanism: The Power Behind the Relentless Juggernaut of Western Capitalism

Consent Is Not Enough: What Men Need to Know in a #Metoo World

Call to Liberty: Bridging the Divide Between Liberals and Conservatives

Rooster Crows at Light from the Bombing: Echoes from the Gulf War