Why You Can’t Live in Climate Abundance If You Focus on Carbon Footprint

Focus on what you can effect first

Photo by Jeremy Bishop on Unsplash

One of the core principles of the Climate Abundant Life is this: Reduce or eliminate your own emissions first. Sadly, most people who care about climate change neglect this core principle. As a result. they find themselves committing to actions that make their lives worse while having no real impact on climate change or emissions. This tragic reality starts with the acceptance of “carbon footprint” as a meaningful concept, which it is not. Let me explain the problem with carbon footprint, and then I will outline what we can do to make a real difference.

The standard reasoning of carbon footprint defines it as an attempt to account for all the carbon created by a certain activity, event, product, or service. Carbon footprint is measured in carbon dioxide equivalent (CO2e), which takes into account the impact of various greenhouse gases, including carbon dioxide (CO2), methane (CH4), and nitrous oxide (N2O). Calculating a carbon footprint involves a comprehensive assessment of emissions from different sources, including energy consumption, transportation, waste generation, and more. These emissions are categorized into three broad categories or “scopes”. Here is how they are defined.

Scope 1 emissions: This category includes direct emissions resulting from activities that occur within an individual's or organization's control. For instance, burning fossil fuels for heating, cooking, or operating vehicles contributes to Scope 1 emissions. For most people and businesses, these are the emissions that come out of tailpipes on our cars and chimneys in our homes and businesses. When we use energy, we make emissions. These are Scope 1 emissions.

Scope 2 emissions: Indirect emissions arise from the consumption of purchased electricity, heat, or steam. When individuals or organizations use grid-supplied electricity, these emissions fall under Scope 2. We make individual choices about using the electricity, but the actual emissions occur in the generation of that electricity, not in its usage. No more emissions come from our homes because we turn a light on. Each of us contributes a small bit to the overall demand, and if we could collectively and reliably reduce demand consistently, the utility could reliably reduce production and thereby its emissions. The key is that as individual consumers of the electricity, we exert no control whatsoever over the emissions. The actual emissions are controlled by the decisions of the utility, not by us. They are indirect emissions to us, but they are direct emissions to the utility. We don't tell them how to produce electricity, we just use the power. If the utility can produce the power without emissions, then our use of electricity produces zero Scope 2 emissions. But only the utility can make that decision.

Scope 3 emissions: This category encompasses all other indirect emissions that occur outside an individual's or organization's immediate control but are associated with their activities. Scope 3 emissions try to account for the entire value chain, including the extraction, production, and disposal of raw materials, as well as transportation and distribution. In some cases, other services like finance, marketing, and technical business services are also assigned emissions as part of an organization’s carbon footprint.

Just as with Scope 2 emissions, all emissions in Scope 3 are someone else’s scope 1 emissions. That is, indirect emissions (Scope 2 and 3) are always direct emissions (scope 1) for whoever is operating the equipment, heating the building, generating the electricity, or running the vehicle. Someone is always in direct control of the choices around those emissions, and that someone is who should be held accountable for the emissions.

When you use indirect emissions to assign a carbon footprint to a thing, you can easily create absurd results. For example, by including Scope 3 emissions in an assessment of beef, the World Watch Institute and other advocates have proclaimed beef to be the number one problem in global carbon emissions, even claiming that beef accounted for over 50% of total emissions. They proclaim this even though agriculture as a whole accounts for less than 10% of global emissions. This fallacy has led many well-intentioned people to think that if they just reduce beef, they are doing something significant for the climate, when in fact, they are not.

An Example

Not eating beef may be a great idea for many reasons, but it has a minimal impact on climate. How do we know? It's pretty simple. Buy your steak at the store. Bring it home. Cook it. Put it on your plate. Eat it. How much carbon has been released into the atmosphere by the steak itself? That’s right… zero. Steak does not have a chimney. It does not have a tailpipe. It does not ooze carbon into the atmosphere. Critics of this viewpoint will suggest that cattle belch and fart, which they do. And those are GHG emissions. But, they are the farmer’s direct emissions and therefore the farmer’s responsibility. The farmer should be held accountable. There are ways to minimize such emissions through proper feed regimens, and the farmer should utilize them. But not eating beef has no impact.

The absurdity is made abundantly clear by this: Many of the people not eating beef to "do their part" have made no dent at all in their own direct emissions. They still drive gas-burning cars, use natural gas to heat their homes, and fail to subscribe to solar electricity or install it themselves. In other words, while they pretend to be controlling their indirect emissions (aka carbon footprint), a decision over which they actually have no control, they fail to appreciably affect their own direct emissions—those they control and can do something about. Plus, in addition to having almost no impact whatsoever on emissions, their quality of life is usually worse because they are denying themselves something they might enjoy.

I'm picking on beef here, but the same logic applies to all attempts to include Scope 2 and 3 emissions in the process of determining individual behavioral choices whether by people or businesses. We are fooling ourselves when we pretend to impact Scopes 2 and 3 while ignoring the Scope 1 emissions that are in our control.

One last comment on the devastating deception of carbon footprint: It often creates a sense of helplessness. We can't see what we accomplished when we focus on carbon footprint. We can't measure success. So when fires burn, the glaciers melt, or the floods inundate, it is easy to conclude that despite our actions, we have had no success. Nothing seems to matter. But our decisions do matter; it’s just that those focused on carbon footprint reduction have no measurable impact.

We must remember that there's a reason why the oil giant BP championed this idea starting in the mid-2000s. It was a way to stop people from taking personal responsibility for their actions by halting their own use of fossil fuels. It has worked to the detriment of everyone.

Return to the Core Principle

Let's come back to what we said in the beginning. Our core principle is to reduce or eliminate your own direct emissions first. And also, do it while making your life better. For most of us, this provides very clear guidance. Our emissions at home come primarily from two sources—gasoline and natural gas. Gasoline is burned in transportation, power tools, and power toys (boats, snowmobiles, ATVs, etc.). Natural gas is used for heating related to home heating, cooking, drying clothes, and hot water. If you want to make a personal difference, reduce these first. Replace them with highly efficient electric appliances or electric vehicles, many of which are better than we currently have. Indeed, the goal is to eliminate all of your own scope 1 emissions.

Then, when everything is electrified, we can deal with our scope 2 emissions in one of two ways. Either advocate and promote requirements for the utility to become more green in its generation of electricity, or take matters into our own hands and install rooftop solar. By far, the best answer here is that the utility takes care of it. If you install solar, you have reduced emissions from your electricity use by one home among tens of thousands served by your utility. If the utility reduces its emissions by going green by, say, 10%, it has effectively reduced the scope 2 emissions of every customer by 10%. This illustrates why those responsible for direct emissions (scope 1) are far more powerful than those for whom the same emissions are only scope 3. The direct emitters have leverage, and when they change, they change for everyone.

Action Item

Here’s an action item from Climate Abundant Life. Assess your direct emissions. Where do yours come from? Consider a plan for using appliances and vehicles less to reduce direct carbon emissions, or for replacing them with electric and thereby moving any related emissions to scope 2—the utility company. Why is this good? Because no state in the US has an electric generation system that is 100% fossil fuel generated. In almost every case, switching your appliances to electric will eliminate your own direct emissions and reduce overall emissions because of this fact. By far, it is the fastest and most useful way to make a difference on carbon.

Anthony Signorelli

To learn more about how you can save money, save time, and live a better, more abundant life while reducing emissions, get my free newsletter The Climate Abundant Life.