Friday, September 23, 2022

Reducing your personal emissions

The big sources of CO2 emissions: electricity generation (±30%); land transport (±20%), agriculture & land clearing(±25%, but agriculture much worse than that because of methane); iron and steel (±7%); cement (±8%).   These are global totals; your country's might differ.  Canada, e.g., has plenty of hydro.

So, to reduce your personal emissions by at least 50%:

  1. Become vegetarian
  2. Buy your electricity from a genuine green supplier, not one that uses offsets to 'reduce' their emissions, which are mostly (alas) scams
  3. Replace your car with an EV, but if that's too expensive, a simple old hybrid still reduces emissions (urban driving) by 40-50% and costs only $2 K more than a petrol car
  4. Put solar panels on your roof if you can
  5. Use trains instead of planes to travel long distance

and ... 

Vote for a party with a real emissions policy, as opposed to parties which are just greenwashing, which will :

  1. Push steel companies to produce steel using green hydrogen/methane. 
  2. Subsidise EVs and electric buses/trains
  3. Eliminate fossil fuel subsidies
  4. Introduce a price on carbon
  5. Tax imports from countries which don't cut emissions.

The only emissions which will be very hard to reduce will be from cement.  But there are ways around that too.

 

Source: BBC
Note that only the CO2 emissions saved by a vegan diet in this chart are given.
Methane (a greenhouse gas 80 times as potent as CO2) is excluded.

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