Climate Change on a Little Planet
Tags: Climate Change, Climate Science, Little Planet, Climate, Climate Action

We’re often told that if we avoid waste and live in harmony with nature, we can stop climate change. But…

Plastic bags don’t cause global warming. Recycling often does. Cattle are responsible for about 10% of global emissions. And reusable nappies cause more warming than disposable ones.

In this article, I’ll go through the things someone in a developed country can do reduce climate change, and show you how effective each actually is, backed up with the science.

The Little Planet

If I tell you that going vegetarian will reduce your greenhouse gas emissions by 1.1 tons a year, is that a little or a lot? It’s hard to know. Tons of emissions are too abstract; what we care about is actual global warming. But telling you that going vegetarian would reduce the world’s temperature by 0.000000000019 °C in 2100 doesn’t help either; there’s no easy way to take in a number with that many zeroes.

The reason that number is hard to understand is that we have 7.8 billion people on a huge planet. Anything one of us does is going to have a miniscule effect on global warming — but between us, we have a pretty large effect.

If the size of the planet and the number of humans make things hard to understand, there’s an easy solution. How about we imagine dividing the world into 7.8 billion tiny planetoids, each with just one person on? If we imagine that happens today, then I can show you the impact of your future actions on your little planetoid and the numbers will all be sensibly sized.

It’s time to meet a friend.

Asteroid 325.

The Little Prince lives on a Little Planet. Coincidentally, it’s exactly 7.8 billion times smaller than Earth, and so 7.8 billion times more sensitive to greenhouse gases. So when the Little Prince flies a mile, the Little Planet warms up by exactly the same amount the Earth would if all 7.8 billion Earthlings flew a mile each. It’s remarkably easy for the Little Prince to see how he causes warming on the Little Planet because his actions aren’t mixed in with 7,799,999,999 other people’s actions.

Throughout the article I’ll tell you how much your actions would affect your very own Little Planet’s temperature in 2100. For example, for an average American, going vegetarian reduces their Little Planet’s 2100 temperature by 0.12 °C. That’s a sensibly sized number! We can compare it to a goal like ‘2°C of warming by 2100’, and see how much it helps.

In case you’re short on time, there’s a table at the very end that shows all the actions and their effect on the Little Planet.

Science and Sin

Like a Mills and Boone novel, an article on climate change has a well-established structure…

Memorable statistic, sad anecdote. Depressing statistic, terrifying statistic. Finger-pointing. Guilt, guilt. You are a terrible person for not doing more about climate change.

Can we agree not to do that here? I’m not going to subtly finger-point and you’re not going to imagine I am. Journalists love talking about blame, and how to dole it out, but that’s a) not at all backed up by the science and b) pretty stupid, because many people are ‘to blame’ for each unit of emissions.

“Should I wait for the next iPhone?”

The point about blame is a bit abstract, so here’s an example. If I buy an iPhone, who’s ‘to blame’ for the emissions — me, Steve Jobs or Apple shareholders? If I fly for work, is that on me or my employers? These aren’t questions science can answer.

Science can tell us how much I could reduce emissions by keeping my old phone for a year, or how much Apple could by using greener energy. There’s overlap there: Apple and I are going after the same emissions. But that’s okay; the real world is messy like that.

The best climate researchers talk about the impact of choices and actions rather than pointing fingers, and that’s all we’ll do here. In this article I’ll always show the impact of your choices and actions, assuming other people do their usual thing.

Method

Full technical details and sources for my method are in a long, dry post, but there are a couple of important things you should know up-front:

I’ll always be giving numbers for average people in the US and UK. If you eat a cow a day, you’ll have a lot more impact on emissions when you go vegetarian. I’ll give you enough details to adjust everything for your own circumstances.

people in the US and UK. If you eat a cow a day, you’ll have a lot more impact on emissions when you go vegetarian. I’ll give you enough details to adjust everything for your own circumstances. The longer you have left on Earth, the more you’ll affect 2100 temperatures. It’s 2020 now; I’m going to assume you’ll be around until 2070. I had to pick something, and 50 years is a round number. You can approximately adjust for your own life expectancy if you like; halve the numbers for 25 years, and so on.

Note that I’m ignoring your past emissions; we’re not pointing fingers here.

This is not a recommended method for controlling global warming.

Actions

Because our Little Planets are made by magically cutting the Earth into little Earth-like pieces, 2 °C, 2.5 °C, 3 °C and other warming levels cause the same amount of flooding, heatwaves and other events that they would on the Earth. All the 2100 cooling effects we find should be thought of compared to those targets. So for example:

Actions that cool the Little Planet by 1.0 °C are a huge deal ; that gets us from 3 °C in 2100 to 2 °C in 2100, which makes a huge difference in practice.

are ; that gets us from 3 °C in 2100 to 2 °C in 2100, which makes a huge difference in practice. Actions that cool the Little Planet by 0.1 °C are well worth doing ; they reduce flooding, etc., by a noticeable amount.

are ; they reduce flooding, etc., by a noticeable amount. Actions that cool the Little Planet by 0.01 °C or less have a tiny effect on climate change. Focusing on them may make things worse by diverting effort from substantive actions.

For each action, I’ve linked to a long, dry post with full sources. All the nuances and caveats and scientific arguments and many, many numbers are packed into those posts, to keep this one readable.

Right — enough burbling. Let’s go!

Reuse beats recycling.

Recycling

In theory, if you recycled everything you could possibly recycle and you were separating paper, metal, plastics, glass, etc., into different bins and the recycling process was the best possible, you’d cool the Little Planet by about 0.01 °C in 2100. (0.012 °C for the US, 0.007 °C for the UK.)

That’s one-hundredth of a degree, not one-tenth. It’s about the warming produced by travelling from New York to Detroit and back once a year on a train. A major reason why recycling has such a tiny impact on emissions is that processing recycling is itself an energy-intensive process.

In practice recycling doesn’t even save that 0.01 °C:

A lot of recycling is mixed, and separating paper, plastics, etc., takes even more energy.

Even after separation, not everything is recycled; due to contamination and other factors, a lot goes to landfill or incineration.

As a result, the effect of recycling on climate change is miniscule. Trying to slow climate change by recycling is like trying to lose weight by cutting your hair. Depressingly, recycling is the most common action people cite when surveyed about climate change.

Plastics recycling needs a special shout-out. As the charts below shows, most plastic recycling is exported to countries with bad waste management practices, where it will end up incinerated on open rubbish dumps, releasing toxic fumes, or dumped into the ocean.