Tuesday, March 24, 2009

This carbon counting is complicated

This story in the Boston Globe, "For a route to green living, you'll need a map," is really fascinating on many levels. First, it introduced me to fun new environmental terms:

-- carbon conscious. As in people are taking into consideration how much energy was used to make the products they're buying. (For example, buying bottled water from France, which uses nuclear energy, may have less of a carbon footprint than buying water from the US, where we use plants powered by fossil fuels like coal and natural gas.)
-- carbon calories. One experts imagines the day when people will be counting the carbon footprint of their food like they count calories.

Then it brought on the guilt. This is what it said about the most energy-efficient way of cooking:
"The microwave uses the least energy, followed by frying and boiling and, finally, the conventional oven. (Think how wasteful it is to heat up an entire oven just to cook a baked potato or two.)"
You talkin' to me? I just made one lonely sweet potato in the oven yesterday. But I grew up when microwaves were the hip new thing and remember the concerns over standing too close and getting cancer, so microwaving is ingrained in my mind as a less healthy way of cooking, even if that's not true anymore. Grrr, this is complicated.

But I felt vindicated when it pointed out that hanging onto an older computer is better than ditching it for a new energy-efficient model because of the energy used in manufacturing. Buying green has becoming a marketing ploy so it's helpful to remember that sometimes the most green thing you can do is not buy anything at all (I'm still using my old-school 19-inch TV that my dad bought me when I graduated from college, although I won't deny sometimes pining for those flat-screen high-def thingys).

The point of the article is that as consumers try to make better decisions, the reality is that we don't really fully know the carbon impact of the stuff we're buying. Great. Now I'm really overwhelmed. Well, then again, the flip side is that as I sit here nibbling on mini squares of Lindt truffles, I don't feel so bad eating chocolate imported from Europe. I'm just gonna have to hope Lindt's carbon footprint is smaller than that of an American candy bar, because Swiss chocolate is far superior and sorry Earth, I'm just not going to give it up for a Snickers bar.

2 comments:

  1. Ah but I'm afraid the chocolate is made using milk from cows whose methane burbs contribute around 20% of global warming believe it or not: http://bit.ly/3o6D5u

    Totally agree about not buying anything at all - or to put it another way: Stick With What You Got ;-) http://www.dothegreenthing.com/actions/stick_with_what_you_got

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  2. That's a good point about the impact of methane from cows. This is from that same story: "He found that people could commit to eating all-local to shrink their carbon footprint, but they could accomplish the same thing more simply by replacing less than a day's worth of calories from red meat and dairy in their diet with chicken, fish, eggs, or fruits and vegetables each week. Cows, because of everything from the amount of feed they require to the methane gas they release during digestion, have large carbon footprints."

    I stopped eating red meat when I was 14 and don't drink that much milk (just in my coffee in the morning) but when you think about chocolate, yogurt, cheese, etc., the impact adds up. It's something to think about ...

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