Climate conscious folks, can you help me answer this question: If we want to stay within the planetary boundary defined by 1.5°C global warming, how many emissions in CO2e can each person make per year?
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Climate conscious folks, can you help me answer this question: If we want to stay within the planetary boundary defined by 1.5°C global warming, how many emissions in CO2e can each person make per year?
I know there are several ways to make the calculation. I just want to get a ballpark number so we can get some proportions in our lifestyle choices.
@malte We'd have to start shooting down private planes, but I'm willing to make that sacrifice
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Climate conscious folks, can you help me answer this question: If we want to stay within the planetary boundary defined by 1.5°C global warming, how many emissions in CO2e can each person make per year?
I know there are several ways to make the calculation. I just want to get a ballpark number so we can get some proportions in our lifestyle choices.
The Institute for European Environmental Policy set the qouta at 2,3 tonnes. That's roughly half of an average Danish person, but most countries in the world could actually increase their per capita emissions under that quota, esp. in Africa, but also places like Brazil, Armenia, India and Pakistan are below the quota today https://ieep.eu/publications/carbon-inequality-in-2030-per-capita-consumption-emissions-and-the-1-5c-goal/
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@malte We'd have to start shooting down private planes, but I'm willing to make that sacrifice
@20000lbs_of_Cheese Will you help me find answers to my question? I'm not so interested in sarcasm. There's a lot of it going around already when it comes to climate change.
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@20000lbs_of_Cheese Will you help me find answers to my question? I'm not so interested in sarcasm. There's a lot of it going around already when it comes to climate change.
@malte In terms of actually changing things, I'm quite serious
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The Institute for European Environmental Policy set the qouta at 2,3 tonnes. That's roughly half of an average Danish person, but most countries in the world could actually increase their per capita emissions under that quota, esp. in Africa, but also places like Brazil, Armenia, India and Pakistan are below the quota today https://ieep.eu/publications/carbon-inequality-in-2030-per-capita-consumption-emissions-and-the-1-5c-goal/
That study was made in 2021 and given that we've not seen drastic degrowth in the last four years, we've made a significant overspending of our budget, leaving less for the coming years. That means the number would likely be adjusted down. But how much - who has a more recent calculation?
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That study was made in 2021 and given that we've not seen drastic degrowth in the last four years, we've made a significant overspending of our budget, leaving less for the coming years. That means the number would likely be adjusted down. But how much - who has a more recent calculation?
@malte thanks for the link. A quick look at page 3 of the source report (https://oxfamilibrary.openrepository.com/bitstream/handle/10546/621305/bn-carbon-inequality-2030-051121-en.pdf;jsessionid=A159EA1F6294BE9447493003B3F9F179?sequence=1 PDF) cites the “2.3” figure but doesn’t make clear how it’s arrived at. I presume theres’s a flawed and (as you say) out of date carbon budget being divvied up.
I note that https://climate.mit.edu/ask-mit/how-much-carbon-dioxide-does-earth-naturally-absorb says there’s a ~100^9 tonne annual natural carbon cycle. Where to go from there I don’t know
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That study was made in 2021 and given that we've not seen drastic degrowth in the last four years, we've made a significant overspending of our budget, leaving less for the coming years. That means the number would likely be adjusted down. But how much - who has a more recent calculation?
You might ask "Which kind of lifestyle choices could this help us change our minds on?" I think a good example to start with is flying. Consider that a long trip like flying from Europe to Thailand burns between 1,2 to 3,4 tonnes CO2 per passenger, depending on airplane type etc.
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You might ask "Which kind of lifestyle choices could this help us change our minds on?" I think a good example to start with is flying. Consider that a long trip like flying from Europe to Thailand burns between 1,2 to 3,4 tonnes CO2 per passenger, depending on airplane type etc.
Best case scenario, you're burning more than half of your annual emissions budget on that trip, leaving very little room to heat your house, buy socks and food and transport yourself. Worst case, you're burning up more than a whole persons annual budget in that trip, leaving less energy for other people in the world to live and thrive.
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@20000lbs_of_Cheese Will you help me find answers to my question? I'm not so interested in sarcasm. There's a lot of it going around already when it comes to climate change.
@malte @20000lbs_of_Cheese This isn’t about how an individual can fix the climate situation. Any thinking in this direction is a result of greenwashing. Grounding private aircraft would be a much more effective than cranking our heat down a couple of degrees in the winter. Not making war around the world would help even more. Don’t worry about numbers. Find some local people doing community gardening. Organize repair fairs. The most effective thing an individual could do would be to DUMP capitalism and break our addictions to consumption. Good luck.
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The Institute for European Environmental Policy set the qouta at 2,3 tonnes. That's roughly half of an average Danish person, but most countries in the world could actually increase their per capita emissions under that quota, esp. in Africa, but also places like Brazil, Armenia, India and Pakistan are below the quota today https://ieep.eu/publications/carbon-inequality-in-2030-per-capita-consumption-emissions-and-the-1-5c-goal/
@malte
Nowadays 1,5 is only mentioned together with overshoot. So you'd better prepare to have negative personal emissions. Or shed some delusions. -
@malte
Nowadays 1,5 is only mentioned together with overshoot. So you'd better prepare to have negative personal emissions. Or shed some delusions.@snippet I'm preparing for both (and have been a carbon farmer for that reason the last ten years). I'm also ready to shed some delusions if you can help me get the numbers. Do you know the answer to my question above? You're saying that the number is negative - so what is it?
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@malte @20000lbs_of_Cheese This isn’t about how an individual can fix the climate situation. Any thinking in this direction is a result of greenwashing. Grounding private aircraft would be a much more effective than cranking our heat down a couple of degrees in the winter. Not making war around the world would help even more. Don’t worry about numbers. Find some local people doing community gardening. Organize repair fairs. The most effective thing an individual could do would be to DUMP capitalism and break our addictions to consumption. Good luck.
@mmm_kay This kind of reply makes me annoyed. I'm a full-time gardener so your advice is a bit ridiculous. Also, it misses the point. If you would want to have collective agreements about limits to our energy use, you need to define those limits.
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Best case scenario, you're burning more than half of your annual emissions budget on that trip, leaving very little room to heat your house, buy socks and food and transport yourself. Worst case, you're burning up more than a whole persons annual budget in that trip, leaving less energy for other people in the world to live and thrive.
In the over-individualized world, some people might be unable to imagine how to use this kind of thinking for anything else than individual action. There's a certain type of apathetic radical that gets easily triggered into that assumption. I get a bit annoyed with this lack of imagination, but 50 years of neoliberal assault on the imagination also makes it understandable.
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In the over-individualized world, some people might be unable to imagine how to use this kind of thinking for anything else than individual action. There's a certain type of apathetic radical that gets easily triggered into that assumption. I get a bit annoyed with this lack of imagination, but 50 years of neoliberal assault on the imagination also makes it understandable.
Just consider this idea: Imagine we had the power to set limits to our common energy use together. Just skip the part of how we would get there (having that kind of power) and imagine what we would do then. Imagine we had made capitalism come to a grinding halt, toppled the global oligarchy and had some good-enough global structures for making wise decisions for the health of planet and people. How much energy could we spend per person and still live within the planetary boundaries?
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Climate conscious folks, can you help me answer this question: If we want to stay within the planetary boundary defined by 1.5°C global warming, how many emissions in CO2e can each person make per year?
I know there are several ways to make the calculation. I just want to get a ballpark number so we can get some proportions in our lifestyle choices.
@malte I have been relying on 1.5t per person. It is backed up here... https://www.atmosfair.de/en/green_travel/annual_climate_budget/
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The Institute for European Environmental Policy set the qouta at 2,3 tonnes. That's roughly half of an average Danish person, but most countries in the world could actually increase their per capita emissions under that quota, esp. in Africa, but also places like Brazil, Armenia, India and Pakistan are below the quota today https://ieep.eu/publications/carbon-inequality-in-2030-per-capita-consumption-emissions-and-the-1-5c-goal/
@malte it's not much a matter of countries, it's much, much more a matter of richness, with the kind of huge differences that are described in the attached graph, and with the most rich 0.1 emitting 304.82 tonnes per capita, the next 0.9% emitting 51.99 tpc, the next 9% emitting 15.84 tpc, the middle 40% emitting 5.19 tpc, the bottom 50% emitting 0.79 tpc (see the table at section "Emission Summary by Global Income Group" here: https://emissions-inequality.org/).
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@malte I have been relying on 1.5t per person. It is backed up here... https://www.atmosfair.de/en/green_travel/annual_climate_budget/
@fideldonson Thanks! I'm happy to get a response to my question. This is significantly less than 2,3. Still many countries in the world are below that quota, but for people like us in the overdeveloped world - quite drastic changes we need to make.
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@fideldonson Thanks! I'm happy to get a response to my question. This is significantly less than 2,3. Still many countries in the world are below that quota, but for people like us in the overdeveloped world - quite drastic changes we need to make.
@malte and the point is that the longer we wait the more we need to cut.
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@malte it's not much a matter of countries, it's much, much more a matter of richness, with the kind of huge differences that are described in the attached graph, and with the most rich 0.1 emitting 304.82 tonnes per capita, the next 0.9% emitting 51.99 tpc, the next 9% emitting 15.84 tpc, the middle 40% emitting 5.19 tpc, the bottom 50% emitting 0.79 tpc (see the table at section "Emission Summary by Global Income Group" here: https://emissions-inequality.org/).
@jones You're missing my point and not responding to my question. Imagine we managed to abolish the most extreme inequality (which causes the emissions you're referring to and of which I'm very much aware of) and now lived in a much more equal world. How many emissions would there be for each person to use if we wanted to live within the boundary of 1,5C?
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@malte and the point is that the longer we wait the more we need to cut.
@fideldonson Yes, the more we're overspending next years' budgets, the less there is left!
