Greenhouse gas emissions per 1000 calories

 Here, I talked about greenhouse gas emissions per kilogram.  This chart shows greenhouse gas emissions per 1000 calories.  The chart is from Our World in Data.

The conclusion is the same:  even without becoming fully vegetarian, by avoiding beef, fish, lamb and mutton, you could significantly cut your emissions from food, which makes up ~30% of total greenhouse gas emissions.  Becoming fully vegetarian would cut your emissions even more.  And becoming vegan would be even better.  Don't say tofu is just as bad as beef---in the chart from my previous post, tofu produces 3.2 kilograms of CO2-equivalent per kilogram vs beef's 99 kg CO2-equivalent.

Purity is not essential.  Going from eating meat three times a day to once a day reduces your emissions and animal suffering and forest clearing.  Eating meat once a week instead of once a day, ditto.  You get the picture.

Not eating meat is something we can do personally, individually.  So is buying our electricity from a green supplier* and driving a hybrid or EV.  Together, taking these steps could reduce your emissions by ~70%.  

* Many so-called "green" electricity providers use carbon offsets to "reduce" the carbon emissions produced by burning fossil fuels to generate their electricity.  Most carbon offsets have turned out not to reduce emissions, i.e., to be fake, and many of them are out-and-out scams.  Choose a provider that generates all its electricity from its own wind, solar, nuclear, hydro or wave/tidal electricity, or from contracts it has with wind and solar farms.

The environmental impact of different foods

 From Visual Capitalist

Click on graphic to see it more clearly

Food and agriculture have a significant impact on our planet, particularly in terms of carbon emissions, water withdrawals, and land use.

To visualize how different food items contribute to this environmental impact, the above graphic ranks foods based on their greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions and water withdrawals, using data from Poore and Nemecek and Our World in Data.

Based on carbon dioxide equivalent (CO₂e) measurements, beef comes in first place as the food with the largest carbon footprint, emitting an astounding 99 kilograms of CO₂e per kilogram of the final meat product.

CO₂e emissions are a standardized measure that express the warming impact of various greenhouse gases—such as methane and nitrous oxide—in terms of the amount of CO₂ that would have the same warming effect.

The production of beef is extremely resource-intensive, demanding substantial land, water, and energy resources. Cows also produce methane during their digestive processes, a gas that has a warming potential 27–30 times higher than that of CO₂ over a 100-year time period [and 82 times higher over a 10-year period].  (See data table in the article)

Following beef on the list is dark chocolate, albeit not very closely.

Most of dark chocolate’s emissions come from land use changes—such as deforestation— which alters the balance of GHG emissions and reduces the Earth’s capacity to absorb CO₂.

All in all, however, the data shows us that animal products are generally more emission-intensive than plant-based foods.

The Food and Agriculture Organization (FAO) states that more than two-thirds of the world’s freshwater withdrawals are used for food production.

Interestingly, the trend that we saw when considering the carbon footprints of foods also applies when it comes to water use. Among the top 10 most water-intensive foods in the world, 70% are of animal origin, highlighting that animal products aren’t only more carbon-intensive but also more water-intensive than plant products.Peanuts, rice, and nuts (which include hard-shelled fruits such as hazelnuts, chestnuts, and walnuts) make up the plant-based outliers in the list.  (See data table in the article from Visual Capitalist)

Eating locally sourced foods is often posed as a solution for lowering our ecological impact, leading to the growing popularity of concepts such as “The 100 Mile Diet.”

An analysis done by Our World in Data, however, shows us that what we eat makes more of a difference in lowering our environmental footprints than where our food comes from.

More specifically, the data highlights that transportation accounts for just 5% of global food emissions. Land use change and farming activities, on the other hand, account for a much more significant portion.

As such, redirecting our attention from the distance food travels to the emissions associated with its production can yield better outcomes in our efforts to make more sustainable food choices.

26% of global emissions come from food, skewed heavily towards beef, dairy and mutton.  By comparison, ~30% come from burning fossil fuels to generate electricity, and ~20% from land transport.   The biggest single step you can take to reduce your emissions is to stop eating beef and mutton, and to minimise your consumption of cheese and milk.  Become vegetarian---it's better for your health, and for the planet's too!     If you can, buy your electricity from a green electricity provider (and not one that uses dodgy "offsets" to "reduce" its emissions) and, if you can't afford an EV, buy a hybrid.  They only cost a couple of thousand dollars more than the petrol-only version, but will reduce your emissions from driving by ~40%.

The miracle tree to feed the world & slash emissions

From Canary Media

Feeding the world without frying the world would be a miraculous achievement. Somehow, we’d need to grow far more food with far less environmental impact while using far less land. We’d also need to grow far more trees, so we could store more carbon on earth and reduce the amount of carbon in the atmosphere.

Well, a miracle has arrived.

It’s called pongamia, an ordinary-looking tropical tree with agricultural superpowers. It produces beans packed with protein and oil much like soybeans, except it has the potential to produce much more nutrition per acre than soybeans. It’s hardy enough to grow on just about any land, no matter how degraded, without any pesticides or irrigation. It not only removes carbon from the atmosphere, which combats climate change, but it also sucks nitrogen out of the air, so it usually doesn’t need fertilizer that accelerates climate change.


In other words, it’s a dream crop for a hot and hungry planet that’s running out of fertile farmland and fresh water while choking on pollution from agrochemicals. At a time when modern farming is under attack for poisoning and depleting soils, pongamia can stabilize and restore soils. At a time when the food system generates one-third of all greenhouse gas emissions, growing pongamia cuts emissions, sequestering about 5 tons of carbon per acre per year.

Basically, pongamia is an answered prayer for the planet in vegetative form — a reforestation crop that can replace deforestation crops like soy and palm oil without diesel tractors or chemicals or even added water. It’s a self-sufficient, heat-tolerant, drought-tolerant, jungle-tough badass of a tree that can produce monster yields on marginal land on a warming planet.

It may sound surprising that after growing wild for thousands of years throughout South Asia and Australia, pongamia is only now being domesticated and reinvented as a super-crop in the United States. But if we’re going to reduce agricultural emissions by 75 percent by 2050 to meet the goals of the Paris accord, while increasing agricultural production by 50 percent to feed 10 billion people, we’re going to need some surprises.

You probably haven’t heard of pongamia before, which is probably a giveaway that it hasn’t yet transformed the global agricultural sector, and that this column won’t be uninterrupted good news. The world is currently mired in a food crisis, created by horrific droughts in Africa and elsewhere as well as the war in Ukraine, and pongamia obviously hasn’t saved the day.

But the crop itself really is as cool and miraculous as it sounds. It really could help feed and heal the world. And the story of Terviva, the Oakland-based company that’s trying to bring pongamia to the masses, is a cool and miraculous story.

So let’s do the good news first.

Pongamia is not a new tree or a rare tree. It was cited for its healing properties in ancient Ayurvedic texts, and while it’s still most common in India, it can now be found all over the world, including in a park near my Miami home. It’s got a broad canopy, an extensive root network, and pretty white and pink flowers that bloom in the spring, so it’s often planted in yards or parking lots as an ornamental, windbreak or shade tree. Its oil, also known as karanja, is used in India as a natural lubricant, varnish and lamp oil. Pongamia seeds also produce the active ingredient in the antifungal remedies you can buy at CVS.

But plant guides warn that pongamia’s seeds have a ​“bitter taste and disagreeable aroma,” with some guides suggesting they’re poisonous, which explains why they’ve never caught on as animal feed or human food. And that explains why pongamia was never cultivated as a crop before a University of California, Berkeley business student named Naveen Sikka visited central India in the spring of 2009, to see if the tree could produce sustainable biofuel.

At the time, the U.S. and European Union had ambitious new biofuel mandates, and investors were blasting money into the space; the oil giant BP had just made a massive investment in a bioenergy research center at Berkeley. Sikka knew biofuels had one serious downside: Using good farmland to grow energy instead of food leads to the clearing of natural carbon sinks to create more farmland to replace that food. But when he saw pongamia flourishing in rocky soils in India’s arid badlands, he saw a unique opportunity to grow renewable fuel on low-quality land so that it wouldn’t compete with the food supply or drive deforestation.

Sikka’s idea when he founded Terviva was to create a genetic library of pongamia traits, a kind of arboreal 23andMe, then breed the superstar trees that could create the most fuel on the worst land. The biofuels market tanked while he was still fundraising, and Terviva had several near-death experiences as it burned through cash, but miracles soon began to happen.

The first miracle was the de-bittering of pongamia. Sikka had hoped it could be made palatable, at least for cattle, though he feared that would require nasty chemical solvents unfit for human consumption. He was stunned when his team figured out a way to do it with a solvent already consumed by quite a few humans: alcohol.

That’s when Terviva began to pivot from fuel toward its current mission of ​“planting millions of trees to feed billions of people.” As a child, Sikka regularly visited relatives in India, and after college, he worked for the U.S. State Department in West Africa, so he had witnessed the developing world’s desperate need for protein and vegetable oil firsthand. Now he had a way to grow a lot without using any productive land.

The problem was finding someone to do the growing, because farmers are notoriously reluctant to gamble on untested crops, especially tree crops that take four years to yield their first harvest. Farmers are only willing to take a risk like that when they are, as Sikka puts it, ​“totally fucked,” which brings us to Terviva’s second miracle: A bacterial disease began wiping out Florida’s citrus trees, inspiring some totally fucked farmers to take a chance on pongamia on a few of their worst tracts of land.

So far, pongamia has lived up to its billing, producing yields comparable to Midwestern soybeans in much poorer soil with virtually no chemicals or added water. In test fields, some trees are producing yields four to 10 times higher than soybean fields. Pongamia is basically vertical soy, except it doesn’t need to be plowed or sprayed or irrigated. It simply converts sunlight, air and rain into protein and oil — plus an extract from the de-bittering process that Terviva has successfully patented as a bio-fungicide. And the field results should only improve with experience and advanced breeding of the superstars from the test fields.

Terviva has now raised more than $100 million, hired more than 100 employees, sequenced the entire pongamia genome, and built a solid reputation as an ag-tech startup. Ultimately, though, Sikka is building a food company, which is why he’s so excited about miracle number three: De-bittered pongamia oil turned out to be a golden-colored substitute for olive oil. A glowing analysis by the food consultancy Mattson found it produced an ​“indulgent mouthfeel” reminiscent of foods fried in butter. Pongamia also has enormous potential as a protein for plant-based milks and meats, as it contains all nine essential amino acids.

The food giant Danone is now partnering with Terviva to develop pongamia as a climate-friendly, climate-resilient, ​“regenerative,” non-GMO alternative to soy and palm oil, which are increasingly unpopular with consumers who care about sustainability. The first products featuring Terviva’s newly branded ​“Ponova oil” could hit the market early next year.

“The universe has smiled at us so often. We’ve had so many strokes of dumb luck to get where we are,” Sikka says.

“And we still haven’t made a dent.”

You knew the bad news was coming eventually. After 12 years of miracles, Terviva now has 1,500 acres of pongamia in the ground. But around the world, there are about 300 million acres of soy in the ground. Sikka had hoped farmers would rush to pongamia once the Florida experiment proved the concept, but that has not happened. The world finally has a high-yield, low-impact crop that can grow almost anywhere, and it’s still a rounding error, barely a blip on the global landscape.

“It just shows how hard it is to change agriculture,” Sikka says. ​“It takes forever, even when everything goes right.”

The thing is, agriculture does need to change for the earth to remain hospitable to humans, and forever is too long to wait.

Sikka continues to hope that more farmers will embrace pongamia. He also hopes that institutional investors with deeper pockets and greater risk tolerance than farmers will finance much larger projects to plant tens of thousands of acres of pongamia. But since hope is not a business plan, Sikka has figured out a way to generate revenue and start selling ingredients without reshaping the agricultural landscape. There are already over 1 million tons of pongamia seeds on trees growing wild in India, and Terviva is now paying impoverished villagers to pick them.

It’s a complex undertaking, requiring delicate negotiations with village elders, direct payments through mobile phones, and sophisticated geolocation technology to trace the seeds. But it’s already produced 5,000 tons of beans, enough to take Ponova oil to market, while injecting $2 million into impoverished rural areas. Sikka believes India can be an economic engine for Terviva, and vice versa. He also believes pongamia could inspire the Danones of the world to invest in other exotic tree crops indigenous to the global South, from ramon seeds to croton nuts to Bambara beans.

Again, though, Terviva’s 5,000 tons are a pittance compared to the world’s 350 million tons of soybeans, and $2 million barely counts as a drop in the $200 billion global cooking-oil bucket. Unfortunately, the problem of feeding the world without frying the world is an almost indescribably gigantic problem.

By 2050, the agricultural sector will have to produce a couple billion additional tons of food each year without clearing any additional forests. That will require dramatic changes on the demand side, like wasting less food, eating less beef and using less good land to grow biofuels. It will also require dramatic changes on the supply side, like higher crop and livestock yields, more resilience to a warmer world, fewer emissions from fertilizer and manure, and less chemical and mechanical degradation of soils.

Pongamia checks a bunch of those boxes, but not at a large enough scale to matter much yet. One lesson of its miracles is that it will take a lot more miracles to transform global agriculture.

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.

Tower of power

 From The Guardian

Australia’s first office tower with a “solar skin” is expected to be built next year in a landmark moment for the construction industry and decarbonisation efforts.

The eight-storey building at 550-558 Spencer Street in West Melbourne will cost $40m and has been designed by the architecture firm Kennon on behalf of Dr Bella Freeman.


It will be covered by 1,182 solar panels the same thickness as a regular glass facade.

The system – called Skala – is manufactured by the German company Avancis and relies on a “thin-film PV module” sitting atop a network that channels the electricity generated into the building’s main power supply.

It is capable of producing 50 times the energy of the average rooftop photovoltaic solar array used in residential housing and will eliminate 70 tonnes of carbon dioxide emissions each year.

When complete, the system will supply almost enough power to cover the building’s energy needs. With the addition of extra panels on the roof, the building is expected to have almost no ongoing power costs and will be carbon-neutral after a few years.

As construction relies on heavy machinery, transport and manufacturing processes powered by fossil fuels, many buildings start with a significant carbon footprint, referred to as “embedded carbon”.

The building sector accounts for 39% of CO2 emissions globally. According to the World Green Building Council, cement production contributes to 7% of all emissions globally, while steel production is responsible for between 7% and 9% of emissions.

The architect, Pete Kennon, said the Spencer Street building would pay off its carbon debt and “actually be carbon neutral”, without relying on offsets and other accounting measures.

Big oil coined carbon footprints to blame us

 From The Guardian

Personal virtue is an eternally seductive goal in progressive movements, and the climate movement is no exception. People pop up all the time to boast of their domestic arrangements or chastise others for what they eat or how they get around. The very short counterargument is that individual acts of thrift and abstinence won’t get us the huge distance we need to go in this decade. We need to exit the age of fossil fuels, reinvent our energy landscape, rethink how we do almost everything. We need collective action at every scale from local to global – and the good people already at work on all those levels need help in getting a city to commit to clean power or a state to stop fracking or a nation to end fossil-fuel subsidies. The revolution won’t happen by people staying home and being good.

But the oil companies would like you to think that’s how it works. It turns out that the concept of the “carbon footprint”, that popular measure of personal impact, was the brainchild of an advertising firm working for BP. As Mark Kaufman wrote this summer:

British Petroleum, the second largest non-state owned oil company in the world, with 18,700 gas and service stations worldwide, hired the public relations professionals Ogilvy & Mather to promote the slant that climate change is not the fault of an oil giant, but that of individuals. It’s here that British Petroleum, or BP, first promoted and soon successfully popularized the term “carbon footprint” in the early aughts. The company unveiled its “carbon footprint calculator” in 2004 so one could assess how their normal daily life – going to work, buying food, and (gasp) traveling – is largely responsible for heating the globe.

The main reason to defeat the fossil fuel corporations is that their product is destroying the planet, but their insidious propaganda, from spreading climate-change denial to pushing this climate footprint business, makes this goal even more worthwhile.

Carbon footprints caught on, and I routinely see people on social media zooming in on individual consumption habits when climate chaos is under discussion. Bill McKibben made the case against them in 2008:

Say you have a certain amount of time and money with which to make change – call it x, since that is what we mathematicians call things. The trick is to increase that x by multiplication, not addition. The trick is to take that 5 percent of people who really care and make them count for far more than 5 percent. And the trick to that is democracy.

That is, private individual actions don’t increase at a rate sufficient to affect the problem in a timely fashion; collective action seeking changes in policy and law can.

Too, the goal of personal virtue is merely not to be part of the problem. It’s not good enough for a bystander to say “I personally am not murdering this person” when someone is being stabbed to death before them (and those of us in the global north have countless ties to systems that are murdering the climate, so we are not exactly bystanders). The goal for those of us with any kind of resources of time, rights and a voice, must be being part of the solution, pushing for system change. To stop the murder.

Underlying this is a conflict in how we imagine ourselves, as consumers or as citizens. Consumers define themselves by what they buy, own, watch – or don’t. Citizens see themselves as part of civil society, as actors in the political system (and by citizen I don’t mean people who hold citizenship status, but those who participate, as noncitizens often do quite powerfully). Too, even personal virtue is made more or less possible by the systems that surround us. If you have solar panels on your roof, it’s because there’s a market and manufacturers for solar and installers and maybe an arrangement with your power company to compensate you for energy you’re putting into the grid.

In my own case, some of what I could tout as personal virtue is only possible because of collective action. I have 100% clean electricity at home because people organized to make that option and the solar and wind power behind it available. I do some of my errands by bicycle because the San Francisco Bicycle Coalition worked for decades to put bicycle paths across the city and otherwise make it safer to get about on two wheels. I can take public transit because there is public transit. Across the Bay, the city of Berkeley led the way in making all-electric houses the standard for the future; more than fifty California cities and counties have followed suit. Paired with the clean electricity California has committed to, this mandate matters. Having an all-electric house or driving an electric car fueled by renewables won’t be a virtuous choice in the future; it’ll just be the norm.

But individual and collective action don’t have to be pitted against each other. Individual choices do add up (they just don’t, in McKibben’s terms, multiply). That vegan options are available at a lot of fast-food chains is because enough consumers have created a profitable market for them. We do influence others through our visible choices. Ideas spread, values spread, habits spread; we are social animals and both good and bad behaviors are contagious. (For the bad, just look at the contagiousness of specious anti-vaccination arguments.)

Vegetarian and vegan diets (and low-meat or no-red-meat diets) have become far more common, creating markets for new products and different menus. But they have not made the beef industry go away or reformed its devastating climate impact. Climate chaos demands we recognize how everything is connected. Seeing yourself as a citizen means seeing yourself as connected to social and political systems. As citizens we must go after the climate footprint of the fossil-fuel corporations, the beef industry, the power companies, the transportation system, plastics, and so much more.

• Rebecca Solnit is a Guardian US columnist. Her most recent books are Recollections of My Nonexistence and Orwell’s Roses

This pretty much how I see it.  Thanks to others switching, I have vegan alternatives in the supermarket.  Thanks to others, I can buy green electricity.  But I also need to vote for effective policies which reduce emissions everywhere.  A price on carbon, for example.  So, yes, do become vegetarian or vegan, do switch your electricity to green sources, do put solar on your roof if you can, do buy an electric car, or a hybrid.  Bur also vote for a party which has a real policy to progressively cut emissions.  Airy-fairy targets 30 years away are no good.  What is their target for 5 years and 10 years out?  This is what matters.