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Looking at carbon emissions, how and where tell most of the story.
Household Carbon Emissions
How
A household’s emissions footprint is composed mostly of five categories:
But then, combined, housing and transportation account for the biggest slice. Those emissions are generated domestically through all we do at home. But also, they accumulate as products move along a global supply chain:
At 10%-30%, food can be a hefty slice of the emissions we create at home. Still, it depends on what we eat. You can see below that meat tops the list with the biggest footprint:
Where
Density is the word to remember. In urban centers where people live close together, households form a reduced carbon footprint. As you might expect, the transportation part decreases because we walk, use mass transit, and ride bikes. Then, also, our dwellings tend to be smaller and in buildings where we share space and we share energy. Consequently, a suburban free standing house creates more carbon than an urban apartment.
At this point, we need one more ingredient. When we look at wealth, we see emissions soar. More affluent households “fly more, have bigger apartments, and buy more stuff.”
Our Bottom Line: A Smaller Footprint
Under the Inflation Reduction Act (IRA), we can claim climate-friendly tax credits. At the top of the list, more than 750,000 households sought the solar panel credit:
So, where are we?
Always, with posts like today’s I like to return to the coast of Great Britain, Explained by a classic paper from mathematician Benoit Mandelbrot, the shorter the ruler, the longer and longer (and longer) the coast. Or, thinking of a household’s carbon emissions, the closer you look, the more you see:
My sources and more: It is always nice when two articles creates a synergy. Recently, the NY Times focused on IRA energy credits. The flip side was where we generate our emissions. Then, we can add this University of Michigan Center For Sustainable Systems and statistics from PBS (that I note are from 2019).
