I studied sustainable design in graduate school. By the end of my courses, before I even graduated, I was already disillusioned. The moment came during my last final exam. I was asked to run a carbon footprint calculator, inputting variables as close as possible to my living conditions, get the verdict on my contribution to the climate apocalypse (I think we were still calling it global warming at that time), and then give a critical opinion on the utility of such a thing as a carbon calculator.
The purpose of the carbon calculator is to give you an idea about how "sustainable" your life is, and as a by-product, to give you some insight into how you can reduce your footprint. (And as I have now come to understand, the real reason for such a thing, by our own deception of course, is to deflect and divert the blame and the responsibility for this mess from consolidated corporate entities to private individuals, like me and you.)
They ask you questions about the square footage of your dwelling, number of windows, wall thickness and insulation values, and a million other things. I ran my numbers, got my expected dose of existential guilt, and proceeded to bash the buttons out of this carbon calculator with my recently-acquired knowledge of building performance, environmental control systems, and life cycle assessments of building materials.
The calculator had good intentions, but I was just finishing a graduate program -- 7 years of studying how buildings use energy -- and I was not impressed.
For one, the calculator was asking the thickness of my walls and the insulation value (these are the number one variable in your energy usage*), but I was living in a basement at the time, so my walls were half buried in the ground, surrounded by the most insulating thing there is -- year-round 55-degree earth. They asked about square footage, but my ceiling was 12 inches lower than usual, because I was in a basement, which makes the volume of the room that needs to be heated/cooled substantially smaller; no metrics for ceiling height in the calculator. But that was just the beginning. They were asking questions about appliances and Energy Star ratings; I didn't even have a full-sized refrigerator, or a freezer, as a single adult, which is unusual to say the least. There was no option for "no freezer".
They never even got into food or food miles; 75% of my food at the time was coming from the bakery in town and the farm a half mile from my house. You eat a lot of food, which takes lots of energy, but the outsized bulk of that energy comes from moving it from the ground where it's grown to your mouth. I'm writing this from the New York metropolitan area; think how far that is from California, and how many miles per gallon, per pound of food you eat from Trader Joe's, and put that in your carbon calculator.
We had chickens; we fed them grain and they gave us eggs (and eventually chicken soup). Because so much of my food did not come from a supermarket, I had little garbage, and whatever garbage I had was composted or recycled; I didn't use the municipal garbage truck for 7 years. That wasn't measured in the calculator either. I rode my bike to get around as much as I could, and when I couldn't, I was driving a Honda Civic, one of the most fuel-efficient vehicles at the time. When I went on vacation, I took the bus instead of an airplane across the country. No vacation plans in the carbon calculator.
I was into the challenge. I had joined together the nature-worshipping simplicity of Bodhi Thoreau with the science-based carbon accounting of the 21st century environmentalist movement. This wasn't just about buying an Energy Star refrigerator, this was about a way of life. I had rearranged in intricate detail myriad aspects of my life to lower my carbon impact, and yet my score on this calculator was pretty average.
I was pissed. And then I graduated. And then the American housing market collapsed, taking the world's economy with it, so I never did get a job as a sustainable architect. I survived nonetheless, and over the following decade, my unusual, low-impact, transcendental lifestyle changed by shades until I was putting ice cubes in my water (BTU points) and buying furniture from a store and not a garage sale (embodied energy points). I even had to start using an air conditioner because I moved out of the basement, and it got too hot sometimes, because you know, the climate apocalypse.
I didn't give up on sustainability, but I did come to a realization about the individual approach to saving the planet -- it all evens out, and you're not making much of a difference. I'm not saying what you do has no effect, but I'll bet you don't realize that for just about every energy-saving task you commit yourself to, there's an energy-wasting by-product attached to that task on the other end that you don't even realize is there. You can't escape it; it's physics. The carbon calculator in the front of your mind is balanced by the calorie calculator in the back.
Just like the planet, we have limits too. And although we often ignore those limits, it doesn't make them go away. Keep filling that Solo cup at the backyard bbq, you know what I mean. Everything has to even out in the end. This report from the University of Geneva agrees:
Mental accounting is impacting sustainable behavior
Oct 2020, phys.org
"Human beings tend to create separate mental budget compartments where specific acts of consumption and payments are linked."
Hanging your clothes out to dry means you might be less likely to separate your recycling; your "sustainability budget" has been all used up. You just bought a brand new super-efficient air conditioner, so you're leaving all the windows open in the house, thinking you can afford a bit more waste now, with all that Energy Star bling.
They call it mental accounting in this report, but it's actually your subliminal physiological calorie counter that's running in the background of your front-end carbon calculator. "Being sustainable" takes energy, both mental and physical. Where do you think single-serving silverware came from?
The point here is to take it easy. I mean, the planet it is going to kill us for sure, but you're not going to stop it on your own by becoming a low-impact warrior. An electric car might help, maybe a weekday vegetarian? But to sacrifice your way of life at the altar of sustainability is not going to do what you think it's going to do. Carbon in, carbon out.
*Solar geometry is actually the most important of all, but it's too unlikely that you won't be able to do anything about. If you can, put the long side facing the south, with awnings angled to block the sun in the summer but allow it in the winter, i.e., solar geometry.
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| Just the Gulf of Mexico, on fire. July 2021. |
Notes:
via University of Geneva: Ulf J. J. Hahnel et al. Mental accounting mechanisms in energy decision-making and behaviour, Nature Energy (2020). DOI: 10.1038/s41560-020-00704-6
Post Script, on equilibrium and sociothermodynamics:
If you change the order of the questions on a survey, respondents will change their answer, BUT when compiling all the answers, they will always cancel out; ALWAYS, an absolute measure that is almost never seen in social science research:
Quantum Question Equality, Network Address, 2014.
Mostly unrelated post script:
