My Carbon Footprint Is Smaller Than Your Hypocrisy:
Comparative Accounting of the Carbon Consumption of
Someone Who Doesn't Care About Their Carbon Footprint Versus That of People Who
Say They Do
Joel S. Dudas
May 29, 2011
Prologue
If a tree falls in the forest, and no one hears it, would it still have a carbon footprint? These, and other universal mysteries, are not things that I care about, because I doubt it matters. And yet today I am going to write about the subject of carbon footprints. Not because I care about my carbon footprint, about which I truly could care less, but because of the increased bleating that I should care and adjust my behavior accordingly. This is an essay motivated by tyranny and hypocrisy. What is most striking about this to me is the fact that there is essentially no way whatsoever that a single person whom I have encountered and who insists on tyrannizing other people's lives in this manner can even come close to the small size of my carbon footprint. Why is this? We shall explore this subject further.
May is Bike to Work Month here in California. I presume the reason why May is chosen is because the weather is generally nice, and bicycle awareness promoters figure that if someone is a potential candidate for ditching the car and taking up the chain and reflector that they are much more likely to get hooked during May than during the cold winter rains. Or during the baking heat of August. Whatever, I ride my bike in every month, unless of course I walk to work. So I, like almost every other person, basically make my commute according to the circumstances of my life, not to some promotional awareness campaign.
In response to Bike to Work Month, at my place of employment there are several different offices that are engaging in a contest to see which office can log the most bike miles during May. The division I work in has labeled themselves the FISHROE TREE-HUGGERS, an obnoxiously green-sounding PC play on our horrible office name (FESSRO...don't ask....the full spelled out name is unhelpful even to people who know what we do). Partly for this reason, I have resisted signing up with this team and logging my miles. As a recovering environmentalist (to be explained in detail below), I resent greatly the notion of being in any way affiliated with these increasingly shrill green-sounding causes that increasingly insinuate supposed moral superiority with the ultimate eventuality being bossing other people around. No thanks. Besides, I would think it would be a lot more important to recognize employees on the basis of their, you know, work performance, rather than how they choose to get to and from work every day. But I realize that's a rather quaint, outdated notion, so let's just drop that whole subject right here and right now.
Beyond this, however, many of my colleagues who are big fans of posing as a great cycler or as the one who always reminds everyone else to carpool somewhere are a part of the broad sentiment that we should all be deeply worried about climate change, that we should be aware of our carbon footprints, and we should be doing something about this. What is that something? That biking to work versus driving amounts to a pittance of an influence on one's carbon footprint should be blatantly obvious by the end of this article. And, no, I don't personally think that all of these loftily-described scams to purchase carbon offset credits are the “right answer” either. Even if I was a climate alarmist, which I am not (I will delve into this in the epilogue), the patent absurdity of those multi-billion dollar con artistry schemes are obvious enough to avoid joining such calls to arms. No, these are people that support materially harmful tyrannies such as renewable energy regulations, ballot propositions, gas taxes, and the like, all with the basic purpose of trying to raise energy prices and costs to discourage energy consumption. While there may or may not be other reasons to not want to spend money on carbon dioxide-generating fuels (money to Iran, anyone?), I make a big deal out of not wanting to support even a just and noble end under the auspices of a very dumb, misguided reason. I actually support gas taxes (and consumption taxes generally, in exchange for eliminating income and property taxation)...but not because I think the person driving his or her SUV around is evil, that CO2 is going to kill us all, and usage must be stopped at the point of a gun (i.e. threat of fines or incarceration).
But amongst the urge to “do something”, it is odd that I (not an environmentalist, not a climate alarmist, more libertarian than 95% of society) have a much smaller carbon footprint than so many who claim to yearn for such things. I think that of the great reasons why is as simple as ignorance. I don't think most of the people who worry about climate footprints actually understand what they are. So I thought it would be helpful - for them and for everyone else - to actually characterize my footprint as compared to theirs. Perhaps, if nothing else, I would be helping the well-meaning actually achieve their presumed desires. Perhaps also, they would see more clearly that they should be spending their time working on themselves, rather than on hectoring other people and reducing their liberty.
The Carbon
Footprint Analysis
It would be unbelievably easy to pick on Al Gore's hypocrisy on this subject and use him as my basis of comparison. Actually, way too easy. So I'm not going to do that. If you are still among the people who actually believe that this charlatan's positioning on this subject has anything to do with bettering the world and is not oriented around his own personal profiting and vanity, then stop reading, keep buying his snake oil, I don't care, just get out of my life and off this web page. You are too stupid to understand the points I am about to make. Seriously, just go.
No, instead I am going to do this comparison to the typical Kyoto-loving run-of-the-mill Obama voter. You know the type....if you are one, you probably think Jon Stewart's show is both funny and competently newsy, you worry about mankind's complete takedown of the non-human world, and you definitely like to show off the fact that you are willing to eat tofu in front of other people. Hey, that's great. More power to you. Not my bag, but different strokes for different folks. Why then, um, is a guy so uncompelled by your worldview kicking your ass SO BADLY in the pure achievement of reducing one's carbon footprint? This is your personal behavior nobility Nobel, your grand cru of individual responsibility, your Everest of think global/act local pursuit. And you are losing miserably to someone you think is no better than a (presumably racist) country hick.
I am going to approach this in a qualitative manner. There are various techniques one could use to do the accounting in a quantitative manner, be they money, Btus, degrees Fahrenheit caused by your evil ways, solar emjoules, or new additions added to Al Gore's house. But I don't need to wade into that whole debate. I can make this so patently obvious that I guarantee up front that no one who reads this whole section will even bother trying to argue with me. I'm that confident. If it makes you feel better, do some research and send me your refutations on Excel spreadsheets. Needless to say, I'm not going to be sitting around with bated breath.
For simplicity, I am going to borrow a page out of Charlie Sheen's book, and refer to cases where my carbon footprint is lower as simply “winning.”
For starters, I can immediately throw out a whole pool of people who cannot possibly have a single word to say to me because the derivative carbon footprint impacts are so much larger, indeed they are exponentially larger. I am referring to anyone who has had children. I'm sorry, folks, but if you have children, that's more of a carbon footprint than all of the Hummers that have ever been sold and that ever will be sold, by orders of magnitude. Indeed, the real Hummer that causes an increase in one's carbon footprint is the hummer you get right before having sex and procreating. Sorry, parents. I'm winning. By a landslide. If you think we should tax the puny amount of gasoline that I buy to mitigate for elevated atmospheric carbon dioxide, then whatever that tax increase is, multiply it by about 5000%, and apply it for each child you have. Then there'll be some “moral equivalency” going on, eh?
Now that we've dispensed with the breeders, let's turn to the childless ones amongst us. To do this, I am going to go from the most petty, pat-yourself-on-the-back-you-are-such-a-green-ecoconscious-soul, then increasing in importance to the things that actually matter. So let's identify the ticky-tacks. At my job, I practice a very low-emission career. Not that I actually care, but I am about as close to zero impact as I think I can reasonably get. Most people probably think they are in good shape because, for example, they sit under modern fluorescent lighting, low in energy use. Got you there...as everyone who has seen my office knows, I have prohibited the building maintenance people from replacing any of the lighting near my office. People call my office “the cave”. On dozens of occasions, incoming people ask “how can you see anything back here”, make jokes about raising bats and cavefish, and squint. Oh do they squint. The actual reason why I don't want those lights is because I detest fluorescent lighting, not because of CO2 balances. But it doesn't matter. The only footprint smaller than one where you've switched to energy-conscious green fluoros is the one with no lights at all. Winning.
Indeed, let's turn to one of the bastions of Big Carbon Consulting, The Carbon Project. According to them, office-derived CO2 emissions (which are about 20% of all commercially-generated emissions) are from lights, heating and cooling, computers, printers, and copiers. So I've discussed lights. There is exactly nothing I can do about heating and cooling in my building, so that's equal. Computers...well, yes, I definitely use a computer, but I've noticed an absence of anyone in my office who doesn't use a computer. So that's basically zero. Printers and copiers....ah yes....let's discuss that. I conduct almost every single item of business electronically. I print and copy next to nothing. By contrast, I've noticed that certain people in the office tend to print out endless reams of CEQA documents, habitat project plans, BDCP proposals, UC Davis theses, environmental compliance planning meeting agendas, etc etc etc. Now of course, I'm not saying they don't need those things to do their jobs well. I'm sure they are all necessary. But the point is, their workload demands constant streams of CO2 emitting printing, forest-destroying paper, and such. Mine requires none of this. I also rarely leave the office, rarely go out in the field, I avoid meetings (and driving to them) like the plague, and do not generate meetings except when I feel it is absolutely necessary. I'd stack up my work-related transportation emissions against anyone's, and win against almost everyone.
More broadly, it does bring up the rather interesting ramifications of the end product of one's work. I generate data. In and of itself, there is nothing inherently CO2 emitting about what one could do with the data I produce. By contrast, and I'm going to say this as simply as I can, but extending, bureaucratizing, and complicating project planning and implementation as a function of what one's job essentially is for is a rather interesting nugget that a few minds ought to simmer longer in their intellectual microwaves. Think of the carbon footprint, folks. Ironic, no?
Unless, of course, one is working on carbon sequestration! Ah, yes, of course...carbon sequestration. That years of sustaining people who drive back and forth working on such projects, build/transport/use intense equipment to build, maintain and monitor, and sustain their very existence itself in exchange for a few pockets of carbon dioxide stored as inches of peat....yes, of course....no carbon footprint could be smaller, eh? Please...the carbon footprint of the financial administration of the bonds used to pay for such projects alone itself is probably 10x whatever carbon is being sequestered. If not higher.
But whatever is needed for the job, true, it's required, no one wants to get fired for non-performance, so let's not hold that against anyone. Food for thought only. I'll be charitable, so I won't even hold that against anyone. Even though I win on the work points, let's be sporting and zero out the ledger again. Because, ultimately, it is essentially meaningless compared to my later wins to come.
The real difference concerns my personal life, not my career. I have already mentioned that I bike or walk to work. Always. I haven't driven my vehicle to work in a year and a half since I moved downtown. Of course, even if I did, my commute would be so short that it wouldn't amount to much even if I did. But can anyone do better than 0 miles driven to work? No, you cannot. Winning.
But I don't just not drive to work, I almost never drive anywhere at all. In the last year and a half, I personally have logged about 2,000 miles total on my truck. You read that correctly. 2,000 miles in 18 months. That's an average of barely over 100 miles a month. Even in my inefficient 6-cylinder Ford truck, with it's faulty engine sensors and crappy gas mileage (for sale: $4200...contact me if interested), that's about 7 gallons of gas a month. Any of you Renewable Energy Groupies able to top that? Even with your rare earth metals-hogging Priuses? Didn't think so. Winning.
As for my domicile, I think I've got that covered too. I live in an apartment. Not a house, with plenty of extra rooms, a garage, a lawn, a pool, or any of that. The apartment is on the middle floor of a 3-story house with plenty of shade trees. I almost never use AC and very little heat, and when I do use heat I keep it in the 60's. In the rare cases I use either, I always shut it off before I leave the house. I do my laundry as rarely as possible, and as anyone who has seen me can attest, I don't iron. Ever. I don't have any pets. Almost all of my crappy furniture and kitchen wares has been given to me or purchased at garage sales. I wear my clothes past the stage where they are worn out and hole-ridden. I never purchase jewelry or art, not even from “fair trade” (an appallingly Orwellian term under the circumstances) shops. I shave rarely, get few haircuts, and generally try to consume as little as I can get away with not because I am cheap, or carbon-conscious, but because I hate going to stores and malls. I do, however, use PLENTY of toilet paper. I think I've earned the right. So I've pretty much got the lifestyle points down, winning again.
But, my friends, now we are going to turn to the point which will destroy my competition completely and utterly forever. So far I have been basically using small arms, light tactics, guerilla warfare. I am about to break out the ICBMs. This article has gone on long enough, and I tire of this diddling around. So let's just cut to the chase. My biggest advantage over other childless carbon cutting hopefuls is in my lifestyle. I eat poorly, drink too much, and generally am headed for an early grave. I will not be around to parasitically hang around into my 90's, emitting carbon like some oil-mad Exxon board director all the while, because I live unhealthily. So go ahead, chew on your organic apples, nibble at your gluten-free petunia sandwiches, and guzzle your 6-berry natural foods juices. You'll be doing it a lot longer than I will. And mining carbon all the while. Just watch. Like a tree mining phosphorus from the soil around it, like an algae bloom sucking up nitrogen, like a baleen whale straining plankton from the sea, you will consume and consume no matter how “zero impact” you try to get, because you are a human, and that's just what we do. Living healthy....it is still living....and living is the ultimate carbon footprint. Except, of course, for Al Gore.
Game. Set. Match. Winning.
Epilogue
I have mentioned that I refer to myself as a recovering environmentalist. This does not mean that I don't care about the environment. I still do. Indeed, one of the great failings of libertarianism is that it seems to so blithely write-off the very idea that there is such a concept of shared resources. I love libertarianism's treatment of private property, but not to the degree of being blinded to the reality of the existence of the concept of a shared resource.
But what exactly does being a “recovered environmentalist” mean? And how does a guy like me balance the two concepts? When I was quite a bit younger, I did what many people do. Look around, see effects of humans, and think “we've got to do something.” While “doing something” may be well-meaning, there are at least two major problems with this basic notion. Number one, “doing something” doesn't mean “doing anything we possibly can.” Too many environmentalists want to try to fight everything on all fronts, at least to some degree. There is little sense of prioritizing battles. There is too little thinking that looking out for the environment should be the focus of most human endeavors, rather than some of them. There is too much thinking that because humans have befouled some aspects of the planet, that we are therefore evil and should be checked. There is too little recognition of good that comes out of productive economic activity. And above all else, there is too much obstruction simply for obstruction's sake. Environmental planning and permitting winds up being 98% about documentation, meetings, research funding, and fees, and about 2% actually related to improving the environment itself.
I read a book a few years ago that I encourage every environmentalist or human-self-loather to read. It is loaded with objective facts about the environment and human society, and is written by an environmentalist. The book is called “Skeptical Environmentalist”, by Bjorn Lomberg, and you are welcome to borrow my copy. I think it will alter your perceptions about how bad the despoilage has actually been.
This actually gets into my second point, which is the more important problem with “doing something”. Modern science has become far too corrupted by advocacy. Scientists are supposed to be objective presenters of facts. The desire to save the Earth may be noble, but as a strictly literal matter, it doesn't belong in Science. Science is not supposed to be about what your feelings are. And way too many scientists have committed obvious mistakes and sucked down Koolaid because their skepticism shuts off when a subject matter is something they care about. Scientists need skepticism like a fish needs water. It is the lifeblood of Science.
Climate change has become the best example of this. It is ironic that so many “scientists” wish to shut down debate, or they don't even recognize the numerous fundamental basic problems with some of the premises being promoted. The desire to implement carbon footprint ways on the lifestyles of people, especially other people, is rooted in advocacy, not science. Indeed, most climate change “scientists” (really advocates) can't even articulate what the scientific issues in the climate change debate even are. When people whose professions are supposed to be devoted to gathering and producing objective facts can't even identify the issues involved in the subject, there are major, major problems.
Sometimes, climate alarmists will accuse people who do not subscribe wholesale to the mankind-is-causing-catastrophic-warming-so-therefore-let's-do-something-anything-and-now belief that they are either: a) in the pay of Big Oil (as though Big Oil won't be the number one profiter off other forms of energy), b) are living in the Stone Age, or c) must be a religious zealot. Also, another common tactic is to suggest one of these three when *any* part of the whole enchilada is questioned. You either have to buy the End Is Near & We Did It wholesale, or you are an oil-funded Bible-toting caveman. Since I am doing none of these three things (wait a minute...people do call my office a cave...), I will close this essay with a list of questions....scientific questions....that one would think would be very elementary ones for any reasonable, objective person to ask about climate change and the need to worry about one's carbon footprint. Enjoy, and have a nice day.
– Since Earth has been hotter, much of it significantly hotter, than it is today through the majority of Earth's history, why is this warming event a catastrophe?
– Since Earth's history has been characterized by periods of high temperature/high CO2, high temperature/low CO2, high temperature/declining CO2, high temperature/increasing CO2, low temperature/high CO2, low temperature/low CO2, low temperature/declining CO2, low temperature/increasing CO2, why is the primacy of the atmospheric CO2 concentration in determining global temperatures rational?
– Since an often-produced graph of the last several hundred thousand years of CO2/temperatures at Vostok station in Antarctica actually shows a significant several hundred year LAG, not a lead, of CO2 changes to temperature, is it possible that CO2 is responding to Earth temperature changes, rather than the other way around? (i.e. degassing of oceanic CO2 to the atmosphere, as would be expected of any gas in a fluid as it heats up)
– Since CO2 absorbs radiation in such a small part of the outgoing infrared (IR) window, and that most outgoing IR in the CO2 windows is already absorbed, is it possible that something else is driving the current greenhouse effect? (like, say, water vapor or methane)
– Where is a true cost-benefit analysis of what various Earth temperatures would produce? We always see the costs, but never the benefit. For example, if your friend gets off the couch and adjusts the thermostat, that may or may not be a good thing...it depends on everything.
– Why is solar-driven warming almost always falsely “debunked” on the basis of a solar warming mechanism that even the solar warming theorists don't say is what's going on? (solar warming theorists postulate that it is due to changes in the solar wind, but solar warming “debunkers” always cite that radiation alone can't do it, which of course the actual solar warming theorists agree with)
– What is causing the IPCC to utilize such bad research (e.g. the Himalayan glaciers), to falsify climate observations, and to try to abort the normal scientific method of testing and questioning a hypothesis?
– Where is there a model of climate that is being used to advance predictions that has been shown to be calibrated to the 20th century climate record?
– What is the basis for accelerating sea level rise predictions when: a) none of the past predictions have borne out, and b) many of the tide gages have recently (last 20-30 years) shown slight declines?
– Given the numerous, well-documented problems with so many of the observed temperature gauges, why are these problems being ignored and not corrected?
– What is the basis for a temperature change to qualify as “significant”? According to what, exactly?
– Why are polar bears (whose numbers have been consistently and aggressively increasing in recent decades) so threatened by this warming now, when they obviously survived the Medieval Warm Period when Greenland was warm enough to be colonized and grow crops?
– Why is it every time I try to engage members of the alarmist establishment on these questions, I get no reply?
