Touching Carbon: Carbon Calories, Carbon Shoes

John Henry Looney, PhD and Director of the sustainability consulting firm Sustainable Direction is a really interesting guy.  I interviewed him late last month for a piece about the gap between low-carbon pledges and low-carbon action.  The missing factor, according to most carbon consultants, is that carbon is intangible in a sense. Though oddly, I couldn't find statistics-- there's just episodic evidence that people pledge but don't go the mile. Could this be one of those things we know about other people because we know it about ourselves?

Anyway, take a listen to Looney as leads us through his calculations:

Touching Carbon: Carbon Calories and Carbon Shoes

Ann Danylkiw's Podcast

My editor cut the print portion of his Calorie explanation from my story-- a more interesting metric, in my opinion, than the shoe size.

Read here:

Looney began with the idea that to most people driving 10 miles is not a big deal. Driving a car 10 miles (assume 40-45 miles per gallon, 200 grams per kilometer) uses a litre (~ 0.22 gallons) of petrol and emits 3 kilograms of CO2; the energy output expressed in kilo Calories is 10,000 kCal.  Kilo Calories, it is often forgotten, was originally intended as heat energy metric.

Looney says, “It’s just a way of getting people to think through and look at it, in my view, in a-- and I’m not going to use the word paradigm shift, because that’s a jargon business word-- but I’m trying to get people to look at it differently, … so people understand the difference.”

For a woman in the US or UK, the daily recommended caloric intake is 2,000 kCals (2,500 for a man).  Further, 2,000 kCals a day is the amount recommended to maintain weight. But, Looney explains, if you do moderate physical labour (for example, working outdoors) you use about an extra 1,000 kCals a day.  If the caloric intake for men and women is roughly averaged to make for easy mathematics, that’s 3,300 kCals a day, into 10,000 kCal of energy is 3 days worth of energy.  The minimum wage in Britain is a little less than £6 (~$9.10), and the wages for 3 days of working 8 hour days, is equal to £144 (~$218.51). In other words, according to Looney, driving a car 10 miles costs loosely, £144 (~$218.51).

It’s not a far leap to suggest that the price for gas should be higher, says Looney, “The reason being… you spend a huge amount of energy chopping wood and we just now turn on the gas and we get a whole pile of wood energy, more or less straight away. And of course that wood equivalent-- you had trees you had to chop down and haul and stack and put in the fire place, there’s a lot of energy to heat a house with a wood fire or even a coal fire, and if you go back to coal fires in America or Victorian Britain because the mining energy to get the coal out of the ground is massive.”

The inspiration for the story:

The IPPR did a report last year, that talked about how to "market" low-carbon lifestyles to affluent apathetic people in order to increase low-carbon lifestyle uptake in the general population; in other words, how to create low-carbon market-makers. Amongst the suggestions is to call carbon emissions pollution, because pollution is dirty but emissions are invisible.  (Carbon Sense kind of gets at this pollution bit with their shapes). But Looney says that people don't really comprehend gases-- they do but there's still a bit of a disconnect.  So he came up with kCalories.  (See article on solveclimate.com)

One approach that almost but didn't make it into the article was a stock market approach.  The Environmental Investment Organization has several indexes that replace a certain percentage with low-carbon companies.  But instead of addressing people, they target market-maker investors.  They want them to replace 10% of their market-making portfolios with green companies by investing in their index.  Admirable, but I preferred to keep the story to a more personal level.