Does tracking your carbon footprint make sense?
As Yogi Berra noted, you can observe a lot by just watching.
I was inspired to start tracking my carbon footprint by Rosalind Readhead, an activist in London who was documenting her every move and every bite. I built a spreadsheet where I entered my daily activities and diet, which a lot of people asked if they could try, but it was very hard to use and I was uncomfortable sharing it.
After blogging about this on Treehugger, I discovered that there are a number of people around the world working on the issue, and a group of us are now trying to develop a spreadsheet that is user-friendly and that everyone can use. (More on that in another post coming soon) But is this exercise useful? Will people use it? Is it accurate? One of our team, João in Lisbon, forwarded a very interesting article on Medium by Nishul Saperia, who writes that The World Doesn’t Want a Carbon Footprint Tracker App. He tried to build one and gave up after a couple of months. Apps are more complex to build (but easier to use) than spreadsheets, but Saperia’s points are relevant to both.
Reason 1: Customer demand.
Saperia decided that nobody would want it. “Consumer conversations and surveys made me realise very few people (even those who are very motivated on the subject) really want to track their footprint continuously.”
This may well be true, but there will be some and the number is going to grow. Saperia wrote his article over a year ago, but the concept of lifestyle emissions is gaining ground. There are organizations like Hotorcool.org which note that “staying under the 1.5° climate target will require significant changes in lifestyles,” so monitoring those changes and tracking personal carbon will have increasing relevance.
Reason 2: I tried it and it’s hard and I didn’t care enough to do it.
“I and most people struggle to relate to what a tonne of carbon actually means on an emotional level. What changes in the world?… There is no feedback loop which is very important for an app to become something you use as a habit.”
Yet millions of people use apps like My Fitness Pal where they track their exercise and everything they eat because they want to lose weight and get fit. Millions of people track their money on apps and programs. When my late father retired in the 80’s I gave him an IBM AT clone and a copy of Quicken; he could look at his computer and tell you how much change he had in his pocket, all pre-internet with manual entries, much like I did with my spreadsheet. There will be people like that when it comes to their carbon budget too.
Reason 4: Carbon accounting is very hard.
This is true, all the numbers are approximations. (Saperia points to an article about how hard it is just to figure out the footprint of a steak.) There are so many variables; In food, for example, almost all estimates of footprints go back to a study by Poore and Nemecek, source of the chart above, and there are big fat gray error bars on every estimate, and they don’t know where your store is and how far the food traveled from terminal to cooler (and I believe that Poore and Nemecek underestimate the impact of food transport).
In my book, I tried to calculate the footprint of a takeout chicken dinner and there were 20 different guesses that I had to make, from how the chickens were raised to the distance they travelled to the type of rotisserie used. I used a lot of data from UK sources and Canadian data might look very different. With cars and transportation, you can find the fuel consumption but you can’t find the embodied carbon that it took to make the vehicle. When you fly, the type of plane and route can make a huge difference. It’s all pretty much a rough estimate.
It doesn’t matter, it’s still a great guide to what is good and what isn’t, even if it is a rough approximation.
Reasons 5: You don’t need an app to know what to change.
“If people are motivated to change their actions, it just takes a little bit of searching around on the net to get a good sense of what to do and what not to do. It’s not complicated to figure out which of your actions make a difference or don’t.”
True. But it helps. I don’t need a finance app to tell me to spend less money or a fitness app to tell me to run every day. Similarly, I didn’t need an app to tell me that driving is hard on your carbon footprint but was shocked when I saw it in the real numbers. It really helped in determining what was important (red meat) and what was trivial (my iPhone use).
6: Once people have made the changes, they won’t need the app anymore.
Who cares? we are not in the app business, we want people to make the changes.
Saperia concluded that this is not something people care about now, but that “maybe a day will come when your carbon footprint will drive your status as much as how much money you have.”
I suspect that day is coming sooner rather than later.