I've never understood how "carbon footprint" can reasonably be assessed. What gets counted? The fuel used to power the diggers that mine the materials to make an iPhone? The salaries paid to employees to take vacations to Fiji?
This is somewhat well covered in prior research, in so far as the information required is available. Here are some recent evaluations of the carbon footprint of modern models:
> The U.S. Environmental Protection Agency (EPA)
provides average CO2 produced (in pounds per
kilowatt-hour) for power consumed in the U.S.
(EPA, 2018), which we use to convert power to
estimated CO2 emissions:
> CO2e = 0.954 pt
> This conversion takes into account the relative proportions of different energy sources (primarily natural gas, coal, nuclear and renewable) consumed
to produce energy in the United States.
The authors note that in many cases accurately estimating the carbon footprint is difficult because the information required is not publicly or readily available. However, they do provide some additional data, improved calculations, as well as motivations beyond CO2 reduction.
But doesn't that carbon footprint assume that the energy to manufacture and transport the panels comes from fossil fuels? Then it seems we would eventually reach a point where a sufficient fraction of the energy to produce and transport would itself come from solar, leading to a reduction and eventual elimination of that carbon footprint.
Yeah, unless this is powered entirely by nuclear or renewables, or unless the emitted carbon is then extracted from the atmosphere, the carbon footprint of all this is most definitely not zero. It's like all those celebs buying carbon "offsets" after flying private to climate summits of all sorts. Dude, your carbon footprint is way, way, above zero, and you paying for "offsets" doesn't reduce it one iota.
One thing that struck me as odd: why does it matter if the carbon footprint is front-loaded in the manufacturing? They seem to suggest that you should wait for the initial installations to get back to 0 net carbon before making more. Why?
I would have thought the medium term comparison to other power sources that it is displacing would be the relevant benchmark.
Takeaway: If you're working for a tech company with billions of users, your personal CO2 footprint is completely irrelevant. Rather than agonizing over flights vs. trains, beef vs. pork vs. vegan alternatives, heating etc. - find some small thing that you have access to and that you can optimize.
That's about 2.2 TWh per year. A decent estimate for average worldwide CO2 intensity of electricity is 400 gCO2e/kWh (that's 400 tons per GWh). A typical personal footprint including some international flights will be in the tens of tons.
Does it matter? The carbon problem can (and IMO should) be fundamentally fixed by wholly transitioning electrical generation to non-carbon producing sources. Industrial/commercial processes that have carbon footprints beyond their electrical expenditure, can be offset by using additional (non-carbon producing) electrical energy to perform carbon capture and sequestration. Yes, that would raise the cost of everything, which is why few politicians seriously focus on this option.
The common component to pretty much every process, product and comfort in our our society is energy utilization. Most people are not going to give anything up just because "the carbon footprint is bad/worse". So let's work on making it so the carbon footprint isn't even a factor.
Energy that is produced domestically. It is both consumed and exported to neighbours. That's a commonly accepted way to account for it in carbon footprint.
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