So, I've gotten a little obsessed with carbon recently. Those of you who speak with me on a regular basis may have noticed, but don't worry. I'm not going to go on a rant here about climate change. If you don't live under a rock, you already know, and you know that our time may already be up. We need to start dealing with this ten years ago, and it's absolutely out of the question to just wait for "someone" to do "something."
The Green New Deal has been getting a lot of press lately, and I'm really pleased about that. But the truth is the wheels of government grind slowly, and even if it passes (in two years, assuming we actually have a president who will sign it by then) a whole lot of precious water will have passed under the bridge.
We can't wait on Washington.
There are two major things we have to do in order to survive. The first is lower our carbon footprint, and the second is sequester the current carbon in the air. Neither of these things will be enough on their own. We need to do both, we need to do them in tandem, and we need to stop arguing over which is more important.
That's a stupid fight.
So, since I've gotten a little obsessed with this, I've been doing research. And I've decided to share my research with all of you. If you think it's worthwhile, share it with other people. Share it as many places as you can, because the more people we get working on this the better.
Lowering Our Carbon Footprint
So, when we talk about lowering our carbon footprint, we're really talking about a multi-fronted fight. There's our personal carbon footprint, and then there's the social carbon footprint, and we need to take responsibility for both. It's not fair, but it's also not f'ing optional.
If you already know how to lower your personal carbon footprint, feel free to skip this next section and go straight to social footprint.
Personal Footprint
Your control over your personal carbon footprint is basically directly proportional to your income. If you're wealthy then you can put solar panels on your house. You can drive an electric car that you charge off that solar energy. You can buy local, organic produce and local, ethically-raised meats. You can buy organic, sustainable food-wraps and underwear and--hell, I don't know. Everything.
The problem is that "organic, sustainable, local, ethical" etc. have all become buzzwords for the new "socially-conscious" middle class. Slap one of those words on a product and it immediately costs twice as much. We're letting the market make it harder to live more sustainable lives, and if I start talking about how angry that makes me we're going to REALLY get derailed here. So, instead, let's focus on what we're working with, and ignore my anger over capitalism for a second.
If you have the money, make the changes.
Period. Don't wait for a more efficient option, or a better chance, or the next gen. Just do it. The money in your bank is not worth as much as the air you breath. Get over it.
Insulate your home properly. A lot of our energy goes towards heating and cooling, and a well insulated home reduces that significantly.
Put solar on your house. Hell, put solar on a friend's house, if you can afford it, and then get them to pay you for electricity. It won't cost them anything more than they're already paying, and that's one more house on clean energy.
Drive a low carbon car. If you've got solar, that means an electric car that you charge from your own grid. If you don't, that probably means a hybrid or fuel efficient car, but do your research. No trucks or SUV's unless you actually have a functional purpose for such a thing. If you go camping once a year, get a tow-rig instead of driving a monster year-round.
Shop the farmer's market if you can. If you can't, you can still buy local. I live in MA and apples are cheap as dirt here. In Florida? Eat a lot of citrus. I know we love produce variety but we love going outside and not being roasted in an earth-sized oven more, right?
Limit your meat consumption. This one is hard for me, because my diet is basically nothing but meat and produce, but truthfully the meat industry is horrible for the environment. Got hunter friends? Buy from them. If not, try to buy meat that has been raised in a sustainable way. Barring that option, try to keep your meat to the lower impact species. And, of course, you can always go vegetarian, and eliminate this issue all together.
Go reusable. Oddly enough, you don't have to buy those crazy hippie products in order to do this. Many types of food come in reusable containers. Mayo comes in a quart jar, y'all. Yogurt comes in a handy plastic tupperware. Is it the prettiest form of food storage? Nope. But it gets the job done. Just make sure you have a sharpie to label things.
Also, if you want the crazy hippie stuff, sometimes YouTube is your best friend. I really want some of that beeswax wrapping paper, and I found this:
You can find instructionals for reusable shopping bags, environmentally friendly home-made cleaners, diy cloth pads--pretty much any simple product, you can make yourself. The key here is to try to make it out of stuff you already own. Don't go buy jersey for a reusable thing, use an old t-shirt instead. Oh, and that brings us to...
Don't buy clothes.
Okay, that's not really realistic, especially if you have kids that insist on growing (if you personally find some of the non-growing type of children let me know.) But you don't have to buy new clothing. The fashion industry is a huge source of pollution. Huuuuuuuuge. You don't like the idea of wearing something someone else has worn?
My three exceptions are underwear, socks, and swimsuits, not because of hygiene but because those things are already worn out by the time they make it to thrift stores. Aside from that, though, I buy probably 95% of my clothing used. Go get friendly with your local Goodwill.
Last but not least, reduce your trash. Reuse things, recycle things, and compost what you can. Maybe it's not always easy, but trust me... it's totally worth it.
Social Footprint
Okay, our "social footprint" is what I call the footprint created by the industries and lifestyles we allow to go on around us, even if we aren't directly accessing them.
Can we directly impact that? Yes and no. On the one hand, nothing we personally do will lower that social footprint too much. But, on the other hand, we can bribe people to lower their footprint, and that really does help.
How it Works:
There are websites that will sell you carbon offsets. They do that by partnering with large projects that reduce carbon output in big ways. Critics call this a "license to pollute" but I call it "have your cake and eat it, too" carbon management. See, for those of us with some (not a lot, but some) money to spend on causes we deem worthwhile, this is a way we can help offset the carbon footprint of society as a whole. Reduce your own footprint, and then pay to reduce someone else's.
No, of course it's not fair. Remember? I said that at the top. It's not fair, but it's fucking necessary.
Anyway, passing laws is going to be our long term effective strategy against our social footprint, but, in the meantime...
THROW MONEY AT THE PROBLEM!!!
via GIPHY
And there are some reputable websites out there that will allow you to do just that.
TerraPass allows you to calculate your annual carbon footprint and pay to offset it. Then they take your money and apply it to projects that reduce carbon output in other places. Their projects are annually vetted and reviewed, and all listed on their website.
Carbonfund does essentially the same thing, but they also work in reforestation, as opposed to simply clean energy projects. I'll be talking more about reforestation down in the sequestration section, for now I'm just notifying you of the difference.
Cool Effect is a site that allows you to donate directly to a project with a price per tonne quote ($3.30 to preserve rubber trees, or $5.77 for biogas production), or just donate a flat amount and let the money be distributed as needed.
I'll be honest, I wanted to start a website just like this, but since they already exist, instead I'm planning to just try and get everyone I know to spread the word. Until I went searching I had no idea!
This is only useful if you go above and beyond your own footprint, though. So, either donate until your eyes bleed, or reduce your impact and only donate 'til your eyes itch. Either way, if you have money to spare, you should be considering throwing some of it this way. And by "considering" I mean "wtf are you waiting for, go do it NOW."
Sequestration
Okee dokee. For me, sequestration is the riveting part of this process, because sequestration is some crazy mad scientist stuff. We have taken an absurd amount of carbon and released it into the environment. Now we gotta pull it out, and that's not a small task. So, how do we do it?
There's no "one perfect way", and for many folks that's a stumbling block. People are waiting for the perfect, and while we wait precious time fritters away. Now, make no mistake, some objections to suggested forms of sequestration have merit. When a scientist tells you that a solution may damage the ecosystem more than it helps, it's important to listen. But any sequestration method where the main objection is "sure, that's great, but it won't be enough" is a method that, combined with many, many others, can be a part of the overall solution.
Natural Sequestration
Natural sequestration is just how I'm referring to anything that captures carbon in the normal ecological process. I'm going to be going into this, but it's important to understand that natural sequestration is inherently a slower process. On the other hand, it's cheap, and long term, and if we're hoping to get to a point where our ecosystem returns to a sustainable balance then natural sequestration will necessarily be a part of that. So, here we go...
Reforestation and Afforestation
Trees. You knew we were going to talk about trees, right? Trees are widely regarded as the best carbon sinks on land, and not only that, they're pretty, to boot. Replanting forests that have been damaged or depleted (reforestation) and planting brand new forests in areas where there were none (afforestation) are popular projects. When investing in trees, though, there are some things to keep in mind.
While they need to be part of the long term projections, trees take a while to mature, which means their full carbon filtering potential isn't a short term help. That's critical while we're teetering on the edge. Furthermore, slapdash forestry is a bad idea. Forest floors can actually produce a great deal of carbon, if they're not planned and managed carefully. Doing research on reforestation is a deep dark well, but let me shine a pinpoint of light on it like this: Where you plant matters, what you plant matters, and making provisions to protect your new forests matters a LOT.
I'm not saying to not plant a tree in your yard. I'm saying, if you really want to look to trees as a solution, donate to a forestry project, preferably one working in the tropics.
Carbon Farming
This is a method of farming which is not planned for maximum produce yeilds, but rather to trap carbon in the soil. I don't know too much about it, mainly because details are hard to find for free on the internet (if anyone's got $50 and wants to buy me a copy of The Carbon Farming Solution I'm happy to read it) but I have to admit, the basics seem pretty straightforward. Plant a carbon greedy crop, once it's mature till it under, and then plant a long root crop on top to keep the carbon in the soil. Allow grazers to eat the grass or crops, wash, rinse, repeat.
Given how much time and focus was put into ethanol as a way to a) help make renewable fuel and b) keep corn farmers afloat, I can't help but think this might be a more useful way to handle that farm land. I'm happy to pay subsidies for farmers that choose to farm carbon instead of crops we don't need.
OTHER vegetation
This one is my favorite, and the one I'm most excited about. Turns out there are a lot of great carbon sinks that grow, and not all of them are trees.
I'm super enthusiastic about moss. If you live in a wet part of the world, moss is an amazing carbon sink, and it also filters particulates out of the air. If you want, you can even grow your own moss garden (again, please, only in a wet part of the world.) . Moss is certainly a more environmentally friendly option than a manicured lawn, and it's fun to walk on. Sproing, sproing, sproing...
Anyway, aside from happening to live in a damp environment, and growing your own mossy backyard, restoring wetlands is a great project to invest in. The catch? I can't find any national programs doing it. The EPA has a bunch of information on it, but it's not really happening on a global scale, not that I can find, anyway. And wetlands are HUGE carbon reservoirs. So I guess, instead of a carbon offset NGO, I need to look at wetland restoration instead.
Grasslands are also excellent for carbon sequestration. I'm not talking about your lawn, here (particularly not if you mow it every week, which is not only insanity it's also bad for the planet). I'm talking about the hardy, amber waving fields of sturdy grass that grow wild in certain parts of the world. This includes things from buffalo grass to bamboo, and there are native grasslands in six of the world's seven continents.
Finally we have costal vegetation, and while I don't have the same fondness for it that I do for moss, I cannot deny that coastal vegetation kind of sounds like the promised land in the effort to reduce atmospheric carbon. Costal ecosystems are incredibly carbon rich, and, unlike terrestrial ecosystems, when the plants die they get carried to the deep recesses of the ocean, instead of decomposing in the atmosphere where their stored carbon is released. Mangroves, salt marshes, and sea grass are not only effective ways to sequester carbon, they also help with the growing effects of climate change, since they help fight erosion and maintain the local fisheries.
Chemical and Mechanical Sequestration
Chemical and mechanical sequestration are likely to end up being the magic bullet in terms of short term solutions. Ideally we won't spend the rest of the earth's life having to manage our carbon to such extremes, but for right now, when huge amounts of carbon must be pulled from the air at rates far exceeding what the natural world can accomplish, these intensive and expensive methods are the way to go.
The good news is people are working on them. Bioenergy carbon capture and storage (BECCS) is a method that uses biomass (like, say, ethanol) to create energy and then, instead of just releasing the carbon into the air, traps it inside concrete, plastic, or underground. Biochar is a term used to refer to partially burnt bio materials, which leaves a concentrated carbon source, which can then be buried. And Direct Air Capture pulls carbon from the air anywhere on the planet, which can then be stored in the same methods used in BECCS.
The bad news is that these methods aren't accessible to the public. Research regarding their net carbon benefit is still ongoing, and since they're all powered processes they do take energy to complete. If we had massive solar energy banks we could offset that, but...
The summary is that research is ongoing to try to make the processes more efficient, and pilot programs are up and running, but, much like our laws, there's an unavoidable time lag here.
Speaking of Our Laws...
Is there a time lag? Yeah. Does that mean we can just sit and wait for it to happen?
Not in the slightest.
The gears are already grinding for 2020. If your favorite candidate doesn't support the Green New Deal (or an even more aggressive climate policy) then ask them why not. If they don't change their stance, change your support.
I'm not kidding. In general I'm opposed to one issue candidates but we have to have a president that will sign whatever bill makes it though congress. And we have to have a congress that will pass the GND, or something more aggressive. So, talk to your reps, your senators, and your nominees for president. Find out what they think. Better yet, make it clear to them what you, as their constituent, expect them to think.
Right... So...
So, that's pretty much it. Reduce your carbon footprint, pay to reduce the social footprint, get involved in forest, grassland, wetland, and coastal ecosystem restoration, and refuse to elect anyone who doesn't understand what an urgent issue this is. And, if you happen to find a TARDIS, make it all happen starting 20 years ago.
The Green New Deal has been getting a lot of press lately, and I'm really pleased about that. But the truth is the wheels of government grind slowly, and even if it passes (in two years, assuming we actually have a president who will sign it by then) a whole lot of precious water will have passed under the bridge.
We can't wait on Washington.
There are two major things we have to do in order to survive. The first is lower our carbon footprint, and the second is sequester the current carbon in the air. Neither of these things will be enough on their own. We need to do both, we need to do them in tandem, and we need to stop arguing over which is more important.
That's a stupid fight.
So, since I've gotten a little obsessed with this, I've been doing research. And I've decided to share my research with all of you. If you think it's worthwhile, share it with other people. Share it as many places as you can, because the more people we get working on this the better.
So, when we talk about lowering our carbon footprint, we're really talking about a multi-fronted fight. There's our personal carbon footprint, and then there's the social carbon footprint, and we need to take responsibility for both. It's not fair, but it's also not f'ing optional.
Personal Footprint
Your control over your personal carbon footprint is basically directly proportional to your income. If you're wealthy then you can put solar panels on your house. You can drive an electric car that you charge off that solar energy. You can buy local, organic produce and local, ethically-raised meats. You can buy organic, sustainable food-wraps and underwear and--hell, I don't know. Everything.
The problem is that "organic, sustainable, local, ethical" etc. have all become buzzwords for the new "socially-conscious" middle class. Slap one of those words on a product and it immediately costs twice as much. We're letting the market make it harder to live more sustainable lives, and if I start talking about how angry that makes me we're going to REALLY get derailed here. So, instead, let's focus on what we're working with, and ignore my anger over capitalism for a second.
If you have the money, make the changes.
Period. Don't wait for a more efficient option, or a better chance, or the next gen. Just do it. The money in your bank is not worth as much as the air you breath. Get over it.
Insulate your home properly. A lot of our energy goes towards heating and cooling, and a well insulated home reduces that significantly.
Put solar on your house. Hell, put solar on a friend's house, if you can afford it, and then get them to pay you for electricity. It won't cost them anything more than they're already paying, and that's one more house on clean energy.
Shop the farmer's market if you can. If you can't, you can still buy local. I live in MA and apples are cheap as dirt here. In Florida? Eat a lot of citrus. I know we love produce variety but we love going outside and not being roasted in an earth-sized oven more, right?
Limit your meat consumption. This one is hard for me, because my diet is basically nothing but meat and produce, but truthfully the meat industry is horrible for the environment. Got hunter friends? Buy from them. If not, try to buy meat that has been raised in a sustainable way. Barring that option, try to keep your meat to the lower impact species. And, of course, you can always go vegetarian, and eliminate this issue all together.
Go reusable. Oddly enough, you don't have to buy those crazy hippie products in order to do this. Many types of food come in reusable containers. Mayo comes in a quart jar, y'all. Yogurt comes in a handy plastic tupperware. Is it the prettiest form of food storage? Nope. But it gets the job done. Just make sure you have a sharpie to label things.
Also, if you want the crazy hippie stuff, sometimes YouTube is your best friend. I really want some of that beeswax wrapping paper, and I found this:
You can find instructionals for reusable shopping bags, environmentally friendly home-made cleaners, diy cloth pads--pretty much any simple product, you can make yourself. The key here is to try to make it out of stuff you already own. Don't go buy jersey for a reusable thing, use an old t-shirt instead. Oh, and that brings us to...
Don't buy clothes.
Okay, that's not really realistic, especially if you have kids that insist on growing (if you personally find some of the non-growing type of children let me know.) But you don't have to buy new clothing. The fashion industry is a huge source of pollution. Huuuuuuuuge. You don't like the idea of wearing something someone else has worn?
Get. Over. It.
My three exceptions are underwear, socks, and swimsuits, not because of hygiene but because those things are already worn out by the time they make it to thrift stores. Aside from that, though, I buy probably 95% of my clothing used. Go get friendly with your local Goodwill.
Last but not least, reduce your trash. Reuse things, recycle things, and compost what you can. Maybe it's not always easy, but trust me... it's totally worth it.
Social Footprint
Okay, our "social footprint" is what I call the footprint created by the industries and lifestyles we allow to go on around us, even if we aren't directly accessing them.
How it Works:
There are websites that will sell you carbon offsets. They do that by partnering with large projects that reduce carbon output in big ways. Critics call this a "license to pollute" but I call it "have your cake and eat it, too" carbon management. See, for those of us with some (not a lot, but some) money to spend on causes we deem worthwhile, this is a way we can help offset the carbon footprint of society as a whole. Reduce your own footprint, and then pay to reduce someone else's.
No, of course it's not fair. Remember? I said that at the top. It's not fair, but it's fucking necessary.
Anyway, passing laws is going to be our long term effective strategy against our social footprint, but, in the meantime...
THROW MONEY AT THE PROBLEM!!!
via GIPHY
And there are some reputable websites out there that will allow you to do just that.
TerraPass allows you to calculate your annual carbon footprint and pay to offset it. Then they take your money and apply it to projects that reduce carbon output in other places. Their projects are annually vetted and reviewed, and all listed on their website.
Carbonfund does essentially the same thing, but they also work in reforestation, as opposed to simply clean energy projects. I'll be talking more about reforestation down in the sequestration section, for now I'm just notifying you of the difference.
Cool Effect is a site that allows you to donate directly to a project with a price per tonne quote ($3.30 to preserve rubber trees, or $5.77 for biogas production), or just donate a flat amount and let the money be distributed as needed.
I'll be honest, I wanted to start a website just like this, but since they already exist, instead I'm planning to just try and get everyone I know to spread the word. Until I went searching I had no idea!
This is only useful if you go above and beyond your own footprint, though. So, either donate until your eyes bleed, or reduce your impact and only donate 'til your eyes itch. Either way, if you have money to spare, you should be considering throwing some of it this way. And by "considering" I mean "wtf are you waiting for, go do it NOW."
Sequestration
Okee dokee. For me, sequestration is the riveting part of this process, because sequestration is some crazy mad scientist stuff. We have taken an absurd amount of carbon and released it into the environment. Now we gotta pull it out, and that's not a small task. So, how do we do it?
There's no "one perfect way", and for many folks that's a stumbling block. People are waiting for the perfect, and while we wait precious time fritters away. Now, make no mistake, some objections to suggested forms of sequestration have merit. When a scientist tells you that a solution may damage the ecosystem more than it helps, it's important to listen. But any sequestration method where the main objection is "sure, that's great, but it won't be enough" is a method that, combined with many, many others, can be a part of the overall solution.
Natural Sequestration
Reforestation and Afforestation
Trees. You knew we were going to talk about trees, right? Trees are widely regarded as the best carbon sinks on land, and not only that, they're pretty, to boot. Replanting forests that have been damaged or depleted (reforestation) and planting brand new forests in areas where there were none (afforestation) are popular projects. When investing in trees, though, there are some things to keep in mind.
While they need to be part of the long term projections, trees take a while to mature, which means their full carbon filtering potential isn't a short term help. That's critical while we're teetering on the edge. Furthermore, slapdash forestry is a bad idea. Forest floors can actually produce a great deal of carbon, if they're not planned and managed carefully. Doing research on reforestation is a deep dark well, but let me shine a pinpoint of light on it like this: Where you plant matters, what you plant matters, and making provisions to protect your new forests matters a LOT.
Carbon Farming
This is a method of farming which is not planned for maximum produce yeilds, but rather to trap carbon in the soil. I don't know too much about it, mainly because details are hard to find for free on the internet (if anyone's got $50 and wants to buy me a copy of The Carbon Farming Solution I'm happy to read it) but I have to admit, the basics seem pretty straightforward. Plant a carbon greedy crop, once it's mature till it under, and then plant a long root crop on top to keep the carbon in the soil. Allow grazers to eat the grass or crops, wash, rinse, repeat.
OTHER vegetation
This one is my favorite, and the one I'm most excited about. Turns out there are a lot of great carbon sinks that grow, and not all of them are trees.
I'm super enthusiastic about moss. If you live in a wet part of the world, moss is an amazing carbon sink, and it also filters particulates out of the air. If you want, you can even grow your own moss garden (again, please, only in a wet part of the world.) . Moss is certainly a more environmentally friendly option than a manicured lawn, and it's fun to walk on. Sproing, sproing, sproing...
Grasslands are also excellent for carbon sequestration. I'm not talking about your lawn, here (particularly not if you mow it every week, which is not only insanity it's also bad for the planet). I'm talking about the hardy, amber waving fields of sturdy grass that grow wild in certain parts of the world. This includes things from buffalo grass to bamboo, and there are native grasslands in six of the world's seven continents.
Chemical and Mechanical Sequestration
Chemical and mechanical sequestration are likely to end up being the magic bullet in terms of short term solutions. Ideally we won't spend the rest of the earth's life having to manage our carbon to such extremes, but for right now, when huge amounts of carbon must be pulled from the air at rates far exceeding what the natural world can accomplish, these intensive and expensive methods are the way to go.
The bad news is that these methods aren't accessible to the public. Research regarding their net carbon benefit is still ongoing, and since they're all powered processes they do take energy to complete. If we had massive solar energy banks we could offset that, but...
The summary is that research is ongoing to try to make the processes more efficient, and pilot programs are up and running, but, much like our laws, there's an unavoidable time lag here.
Speaking of Our Laws...
Is there a time lag? Yeah. Does that mean we can just sit and wait for it to happen?
Not in the slightest.
I'm not kidding. In general I'm opposed to one issue candidates but we have to have a president that will sign whatever bill makes it though congress. And we have to have a congress that will pass the GND, or something more aggressive. So, talk to your reps, your senators, and your nominees for president. Find out what they think. Better yet, make it clear to them what you, as their constituent, expect them to think.
Right... So...
So, that's pretty much it. Reduce your carbon footprint, pay to reduce the social footprint, get involved in forest, grassland, wetland, and coastal ecosystem restoration, and refuse to elect anyone who doesn't understand what an urgent issue this is. And, if you happen to find a TARDIS, make it all happen starting 20 years ago.
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