Can someonr explain thr math of how someone is supposed to be able to be even close to net zero carbon footprint?

You're not supposed to. It is a marketing ploy from oil and gas companies to shift the blame from corporations to individuals for their pollution.

129

The oil and gas companies and their "environmentalist" buddies.

We could have prevented climate change with nuclear power in the 1990s.

Even without solar and wind (they were too expensive at the time) or carbon taxes, Sweden and France managed to get emissions down to 5 tons per capita with old nuclear and hydro technology. If all rich countries had done the same thing, climate change would have been a non-issue.

We can still solve it today with today's technologies: solar, wind and battery technology has evolved and become affordable. Carbon taxes are politically feasible. And old nuclear technology is becoming more acceptable and gearing up.

Sure, try to help by reducing your energy use where possible and investing in things like home insulation and energy efficient heating and transportation.

But the actual big things that need to be done can only be done by politicians, to force economies to change.

33
- Even without solar and wind (they were too expensive at the time)
  
  This is true and I'm not disputing this fact, but had the oil companies not interfered with and killed off any attempts at alternative energy sources, things may have been quite different.
  
  9
- I’m curious how mass nuclear energy adoption in the 90s would have offset the impact of agriculture, livestock, and the oil and gas industry. I don’t see how nuclear energy would have made climate change a non-issue.
  
  5
- carbon taxes are politically feasible
  
  Not in the United States, they're not. I actually work with politicians as a climate lobbyist and carbon taxes are a complete non-starter.
  
  1
- Batteries are not quite there yet. It's still quite a large investment to build massive batteries that can help small to medium towns for short periods of time. As an EE I'm hoping we make a breakthrough soon that will allow us to increase their energy density. Either that or move to different liquid fuels, which have an energy density advantage.
  
  0
Yeah holy shit I can't believe that people are braking their head about this ...

7
- I don't know is mistype or not, but I find that both “braking” their heads and “breaking” their heads work in this context.
  
  1
We’re burning these fuels and spending the energy on these sectors.

It’s mostly due to burning coal, oil and gas while expecting to get electricity, heat and motion out of it. Which sectors need to change urgently? Industry in general, road transport and buildings.

7

Breathing does not create Carbon, it is only transformed.

There are basically 2 pools of carbon. The carbon already in circulation in the athmosphere, plants, animals and so on, roaming at the surface. That Carbon can be CO2, or other mollecules, but there is always a fixed amount. You breathing is simply borrowing the carbon for a bit and putting it out again in the air when exhaling.

The second pool is carbon locked away in the ground, as coal, oil and whatnot. That carbon is OLD and is not supposed to be in the first pool. When you burn oil, the carbon from the 2nd pool ends up in the 1st one. You cannot really offset it because even planting trees just transforms it as wood for a bit, but if the tree burns or rots, the carbon goes back in the air. The only option long term is to send the carbon back in a locked state in the second pool.

But for you, just reduce the amount of carbon you move from pool 2 to pool 1 to help the earth. Cut on oil, gas, coal as much as you can. The rest is basically irrelevant.

You can compare it to the water cycle. You are at a lake with a pump, and pump the water from the lake back into the lake. You can keep going forever and will not cause the lakes to rise since the water is pumped from there anyway. BUT, if a mega corporation starts pumping from underground sources and dumping it in that lake, it would overflow for sure. And they would blame you for all the water you are pumping.

80

This is a really important insight. To add to it: back when the carbon from Pool 2 was in the atmosphere, dinosaurs were roaming the earth and it was a lot hotter than it is now.

This is obviously a simplification, it but it drives home the point that once the carbon is out of Pool 2 it will cause global warming. The only way to stop that is to stop moving carbon from Pool 2 into Pool 1, ie stop fossil fuel mining.

Of course we could try to move carbon from Pool 2 to Pool 1, but it took the Earth millions of years to do that, and many of the plant species that did it are now extinct. Perhaps once we're exinct, they might evolve again.

14
Is there any way to bring carbon from pool 1 into 2? Or we already fucked up and have to live with it now?

5
- Yes, carbon sequestration is the term for it, but none of them are currently practical to do on a scale that would mitigate the effects of the fossil fuels we burn. Growing trees is an example of this, as they do lock up carbon in the process of growing, but they're kind of a risky prospect since if the tree dies and rots or is caught in a wildfire then it releases the carbon again. Another option is literally just sticking it back underground in mines or oil wells, but of course that takes a lot of energy to do and then whole point of burning fossil fuels is to get energy so this one is currently a bit self-defeating. They're things that might be helpful to do if we succeed in transitioning to clean energy and have an excess of it available
  
  6
Re trees: It follows that growing some trees doesn't help much, but growing a forest on otherwise bare land will act as a carbon sink as long as it's not cut down - dead trees will be replaced without human intervention

1
Breathing does not create Carbon, it is only transformed.

Yet somehow when cows do it this is not the case.

Your premise is that the only carbon that's new is from fossil fuels, which I can agree with (to a point; it came from biomass originally so is not truly new, just reintegrated after a billion years) but the problem is your view, the view we had for a few decades until very recently, is not the most common view. People talk about carbon in biomass going through the carbon cycle as if it's a bad thing now, and you get called a fucking denier of all things if you point out that that is ridiculous.

-2
- No one is complaining about the carbon a cow is breathing in and out. It's the methane they produce, which is a very potent greenhouse gas, about 80 times the warming power.
  
  21
- Cows fart which creates methane. Methane is a much worse greenhouse gas than CO2. Like 25x worse. Add on to that we artificially increase the bovine population by orders of magnitude than they'd naturally attain so we can consume them. They contribute a lot to climate change.
  
  7
- Cows do not create carbon. They turn it into methane which is a worse form of carbon.
  
  The same way you can turn carbon in biomass to "lock" it from the atmosphere, you can turn it in worse forms of gas that cause even more heating like methane. The methane will turn back in CO2 form once it burns or degrade naturally (a dozen years or so) but while it is under methane form, it will make it worse, accelerating the heating effects. But even stopping all methane emissions is only a temporary solution as carbon from pool 2 keeps moving in pool 1. It may give us more time before reaching the same level of greenhouse effect but we will reach it anyway.
  
  4

As others have pointed out, individuals are not the problem nor are they the solution. How we produce energy and manufacture goods are the issue. The corporations producing energy and manufacturing goods don't want to change to sustainable alternatives because it will cost them money. So they've invented the idea of a carbon footprint to make it seem like it's your desire for electricity that is the problem and not how they generate it.

39

Don't say we because you're not part of it. You're the victim of it.

16
- You're part of it if you use electricity or consume anything you didn't grow in your own garden.
  
  Everyone likes to say "it's the oil and gas companies" but like, no shit, we burn oil and gas, and billions of people die if we just suddenly stop.
  
  Corporations aren't giggling madmen burning gas for fun. They're shipping things across oceans and powering cars and buildings, they're making shit you buy.
  
  Every single person contributes to climate change and it is by changing spending and investment habits (which is ongoing and has been for a while) that we overcome climate change.
  
  2
If we were actually net zero, humans would still reproduce until we aren't anymore.

Overpopulation is an unsolvable problem.

-10

One thing that the carbon neutral concept overlooks is that the world is perfectly capable of absorbing the carbon output of a single person.

For average individuals we are not able to overwhelm the world with our carbon output. There is a carbon cycle and as CO2 increases in the atmosphere, plants grow faster and bring it back to a stable median.

It is massive industrialization that has overwhelmed the capacity of the earth to absorb the excess carbon dioxide created by humankind.

What you should do is spend your money on companies that have embraced carbon neutrality or being carbon negative, purchase items from low carbon companies, and be reasonable and responsible with your use of energy, including fuel and electricity.

When you have opportunities to vote for environmental initiatives, you should vote for them.

While you should be conspicuous of your carbon footprint in the environment that we have, you should also know that your ability to actually fix the issue is practically non-existent. The only thing that is going to fix the issue is government ruling that forces industries to stop polluting the environment at the rate that they are doing even if it causes our economy to decrease.

The only way for such initiatives to ever happen is if the population becomes carbon conscious and pushes for such initiatives. If enough of us do enough then the people in power will move to come towards us and make changes that will help keep them in power.

27

You're missing something: it's all a bunch of bullshit. So in a sense it's hopeless, but you've got to ask yourself why even existing makes it hopeless? Because the feeling of hopelessness you get is a lie. Someone wants you to feel like nothing is ever enough.

I'm not saying fossil fuels are not releasing CO2 and all that, I'm not a denier. My point is only that these new ideas about your carbon footprint, that come from eating food and breathing, are absolutely ridiculous bullshit. Carbon in the carbon cycle already does not contribute to your footprint. It's a lie to make you guilty when you didn't do anything. Youre being gaslit.

The only carbon that counts towards your carbon footprint are 1) fossil fuels that you consume, 2) plastics from fossil fuels that you dispose of (they may not be atmospheric carbon now, but they'll inevitably end up in the carbon cycle) and 3) your economic choices that lead to the destruction of natural carbon sinks, such as buying palm oil or products that contain it, Brazilian beef raised on torched amazon land, etc. You should not be concerned whatsoever about breathing and eating meat if your concern is carbon output.

26

Yeah, most people don't know that the carbon footprint concept was invented my BP... an oil company. Trying to push blame off them and onto the individual instead.

11
Oh that first sentence had me thinking you were going a completely different direction! 🤣

2
- Yeah, most people just assume you don't believe in climate change if you disagree with any part of the narrative, it's cult like. I believe in climate change, fossil fuels cause it and all that stuff, but I have to reassure people of that every time I talk about this because I don't just not my head when the topic comes up, I try to think about it critically.
  
  3

You're not supposed to plant trees like there's no tomorrow, but simply stop using fossil fuels. Simple as that.

Your respiration is already net zero. Plants capture CO2 to grow, you eat the plant, breathe out CO2, plants absorb that CO2 again. You should have heard about the carbon cycle in school. If not, look it up.

All the other emissions, the not net zero ones, are some form of fossil resource. Oil, gas, coal. You can't reasonably offset these, you just stop using them. There's no way around that.

25

Yeah it just kind of clicked for me that if I eat plants, that was net zero, but if I eat meat, there was another animal that had to emit CO2 (and other gases) at the same time as me before becoming food. So the opposite of plants taking my CO2 to become food, the animal emitted CO2 while becoming food.

8
- What did you think, the animal ate? Oil?
  
  7
- Those animals ate plants op. Thats not where the emissions are coming from. At least not directly. Theyre coming from all the fossil fuels that were burned to run the farms and make the fertillizer used to grow crops that you and those animals ate. And realistically most of the CO2 you emit is indirect. i.e Production and transport of products that you buy. Even just drinking water from your tap required resources to be expended to purify, chlorinate and pump to your house.
  
  In order to acheive a Carbon neutral or even Carbon negative economy, CO2 needs to be captured and the reality is that the steps that are needed to do this are not being taken. Industry is moving at a snail's pace and government has made no real attempt to either facilitate or force the level of change needed.
  
  6
- All life on earth is based around carbon
  
  Most of what we eat (which is mostly carbon) ends up being exhaled as CO2, and what we don't and ends up as poop gets eaten by bacteria and such and turned into CO2 then (or other stuff like methane, which still ultimately ends up breaking down into co2.) We're not taking any significant amount of carbon into our bodies from any source but our food.
  
  And that's true the whole way down the food chain, all the carbon you get from eating a cow, the cow got from eating grass. If you eat, for example, a fox, the fox got it's carbon from eating a rabbit or squirrel or whatever which in turn got it from eating acorns and carrots and such. If you eat a tuna, it got it's carbon from a smaller fish, that got it from still smaller fish, down until you find something that's eating plankton.
  
  And pretty much all of the carbon that made up that grass, oak tree, carrot, plankton, etc. came from the air, so from animals and such breathing it out.
  
  And it just keeps going around and around the carbon cycle.
  
  That's all pretty much a self regulating cycle, you don't really need to worry about reducing or offsetting what you're breathing, nature takes care of that pretty well.
  
  The issue is that for millions of years, we've had a lot of carbon sequestered deep in the earth in the form of fossil fuels- coal, oil, natural gas, etc.
  
  That carbon has been out of the cycle for a very long time, and within the last couple of hundred years we started burning a whole lot of it, releasing it back into the atmosphere, and for a lot of reasons, our environment isn't really able to do anything with all that extra carbon now.
  
  So that's the carbon you need to worry about reducing and offsetting.
  
  A lot of carbon offsets take the form of planting trees. Trees do ok at carbon sequestration because trees are made of carbon, and they tend to stick around for a while. You suck a bunch of carbon out of the air, turn it into a tree, and then that carbon isn't really going anywhere for usually years, decades, maybe even centuries depending on the species, the climate, etc. But of course we also cut down a lot of trees, so that's kind of a Sisyphean task to plant trees faster than they're being cut down elsewhere.
  
  This is also all of course a big simplification, that leaves a whole lot out for the sake of keeping things simple.
  
  1

Congrats, you fell for the scam. Don't worry, we all did at one point. To be clear, I'm not saying climate change is a scam, I'm saying "it's all your fault" is a scam.

25

Right, human induced climate change is real.

To clarify further though, the blame should rest almost exclusively on the shoulders of the oil companies, and they are desperate to deflect that blame, onto anyone but them.

0
- Oil companies don't burn oil. They sell it.
  
  0

The world has its own CO2 cycle so it's not that we need to reach 0, we just need to reach a balanced emission threshold. Though at this point we will also need to aid this process with further removal.

The issue is mostly that we are outputting too much. Shipping industries, energy production, other transport such as cars and planes. These industries are a big part of the problem and the ones fueling (e.g. oil) them are the ones most interested in your feeling of hopelessness, as then they have free reign over their actions.

The world has and will get hotter. There will be more disasters. But it's unlikely to be the end of civilisation. The more we act now, the fewer people will suffer.

It's not a hopeless cause at all. Look at our tech now vs 100 years ago. Humanity has the means to do it.

22

Folks generally don't consider offsetting their own breath, that's extreme.
The vast majority of oxygen comes from phytoplankton in the ocean.

18

Offsetting your own breath seems unnecessary. A human being does not produce CO2 out of nowhere. It comes from oxygen, which we breathe in, and carbon which we eat. The food absorbs the carbon from the atmosphere when it grows, so taken in total the whole cycle is completely carbon neutral.

The reason CO2 concentration is increasing is because we're digging it up from the ground and releasing it into the air. Taking CO2 from the air and then putting it back a short time later is not really an issue.

Also, I'm really questioning OP's numbers here. The CO2 a person produces should be absorbed by about 15 trees, from what I can find. Or is he trying to solve the global climate problem with only potted plants?

12

Individual guilt is never gonna beat organized engineering.

13

You can't. You can't make your carbon footprint zero without a lot of money. That's thing though. There are a lot of people who have shittons of money who could not only make your footprint zero, but help make everyone else's footprint zero. These people, however, are often the ones who benefit from having non-zero carbon footprints. The rest are too obsessed with enriching themselves to spend the money to ensure their riches are still worth anything 20-30yrs from now.

12

Last estimate was something in the range of three trillion trees, palms are probably not the most carbon dense tree for removing CO2. But all kinds of organisms help break down CO2 including Algae.

But don't think that your breathing is to blame for CO2, it's deforestagion, shipping, fossil fuels, war and bushfires are.

Make things, buy local and travel local.

11

How many extra trees do you need to offset the manufacture of that unnecessary CO2 meter?

11

That's why you buy a second CO2 meter and go measure at the factory the first one was built in. That way you'll know how many trees to plant for the two CO2 meters.

8

There's a lot of greenery on Earth - seaweeds recycle a huge amount of CO2, as are all the plants we use and eat. It would be completely enough, especially as we keep killing off all the other animals that produce CO2.

It's just unfortunate that we're destroying the oceans too, and agriculture is a heavy industry with more polution. And while we kill off the harmless or useful wild animals, we replace them with livestock, and you know where that is going.

As individuals, we really can't do much in this regard. I guess you can do more biking instead of driving, reusing older products, buying local, stuff like that, but this really won't make a dent when industries keep using the dirtiest possible processes to save a cent, or if nuclear power keeps being lobbied out.

10

A quick Google search says there are 3 trillion trees on Earth. So that's 500 trees per person but as mentioned before things like algae and other sources make up more.
The carbon from your breathing is carbon neutral since all the carbon in your body comes from food which comes ultimately comes from plants. However the carbon dioxide used to produce and transport your food is where the excess comes from.
If you want to minimize your carbon footprint it's more about understanding which behaviors contribute the most. Eg an economy flight from the US to Europe is like 1.5 tons of CO2. That's like years of respiration.
Of course the problem is hard to solve as an individual. Maybe there just needs to be assignable liability for certain activities and the correct legal and economic system setup to optimize better for ecological issues.

7

Become a vegan activist and if you convince a few people to go vegan you can actually become carbon negative.

Also plant some trees.

7

Surely this is satire?

3

CO meter for sure, but a CO2 meter? It's actually a good idea to have CO alarms in your house if using natural gas powered appliances. However CO2 is only a concern if you're in a hermetically sealed environment like a submarine or space ship. I suppose it could be useful to check proper ventilation in the home, but normally you can just open a window.

Anyway the Earth has a carbon cycle, in other words it filters natural CO2 emissions through environmental processes. The problem is the amount added by industry is more than the natural carbon cycle can process. So levels are steadily increasing.

When we talk about zero carbon footprint we mean sources from industry like driving gasoline powered cars, generation of electricity, and production of consumer goods. A good amount already comes from natural processes like volcanos and erosion so we don't actually need a zero carbon footprint, just need it low enough to avoid overwhelming the natural cycle.

At a personal level it would be just about impossible to have a zero carbon footprint. If you had a solar and wind powered home off-grid and used it to charge an electric car you could be well below average. However any consumer goods you use put carbon in the air to produce them. Even if you went full native you'd still be putting carbon in the air burning wood and candles.

3

Actually the CO2 meter showed levels in my home during the day at 1350 (I think over 1000 is bad - 10% cognitive decline I think occurs at 1500) and in the morning over 2100 in my bedroom! The AC turns off and the CO2 just builds up I guess.

I did the research to see if any amount of houseplants could offset it (nope), but yes, opening a window is exactly the solution. Problem is I live in Florida and it is way too hot to do that. So I compromised and turned on a bathroom vent all day and it is keeping the levels to around 800 per day. It basically is slowly sucking air through the not perfectly sealed home and expelling it through the roof.

But I recognize now my AC will have to work harder to cool the incoming air and make my home less efficient, thus doing worse overall. Happily we have a nuclear power plant here but still.

2
Most people use CO2 meter at home to measure air quality. If you're in room that is not well ventilated, depending on the size of the room, CO2 will reach pretty high levels within minutes. Unless it's really bad, it's not high enough to kill you (which is why people have CO detectors) but spending long time in the environment (hours) might cause issues with how well you can focus, trigger headache or migraine, cause tiredness if this is your bedroom, etc..

1

Just try to act responsibly. Don't drive if you don't have to, recycle, start a compost heap. If you spend all day worrying about the "carbon footprint" of your own breathing then you'll just end up driving yourself crazy and blowing all your money on online scams

3

The main problem is that all the fossil fuel is carbon that has been trapped in a non-gaseous state (solid for coal, liquid for oil) for millions of years. Stuff that, under normal circumstances, would probably never get released back into the atmosphere.

So, for all intents and purposes, the only way to try and be carbon neutral is to offset your fossil fuel consumption. Not only trees, but also algae, which have a hard time thanks to all the shit we throw in the ocean, plus the overfishing. As others pointed, companies love throwing the term around to smoke their endless destruction in the name of FUCK TOMORROW, PROFITS NOW!

2

Check this out:

https://en-roads.climateinteractive.org/scenario.html

As others have pointed out, this is an industrial-scale problem that can't be solved through individual consumer choices, but if I understand your post, you're asking more genuinely how we are ever supposed to make the math work.

This is a simple, user-friendly research-grade tool for analyzing the projected effects of various interventions. The answer to your question is:

We decarbonize energy generation
We decarbonize transport
We stop generating methane (from industry and farming)
We stop deforesting and start reforesting

Doing all of these will stop the increase of heating, which will keep us to around 1.5 degrees of warming. The last step required would be industrial direct-air carbon capture.

That's currently the best plan that physics and engineering offer us.

2

Net zero is less of a number and more like a notion. Is existing in our environment with the least climatic influence a good thing? One way to achieve that would be lethal pandemic. We don't know what our true impact is and may never know. Net zero in practical terms means reducing energy consumption and pollution. It inevitably implies reducing the population and finding an alternative to capitalism. We may have to revert to a more primative life whether we want to or not.

2

Overpopulation is an issue that has to be aknowledged but the earth would be able to sustain a lot more people if we wouldn't pollute as much.

2

If I remember correctly, a lot of oxygen comes from algae, and this is due to photosynthesis. There are startups out there trying to do CO2 capture with algae

I think there is only so much 1 person can do to offset the emissions for billions of people (really 100s of companies). One of the more important things you can do at a larger scale is to contribute to movements and vote

2

It’s not going to happen.

1

I think your math is wrong, most websites I see say 7 or 8 trees produce all the air you breathe, so that's perfectly reasonable.

Offsetting the rest of your consumption is another thing, but not something a single person can do. An average person doesn't personally produce a crazy amount of CO2, it's industrial and excessive consumption that does the bulk of it.

1

It was a study I read for figuring out how many houseplants would it take to clean the indoor air for a house. So I guess tree is a bit of the wrong image. Probably large houseplant that grows quickly but is technically a tree.

The 7 or 8 trees are probably very large oak or something.

2

Build nuclear power plants, problem solved.

-1

The most dangerous part of nuclear power is not using enough nuclear power

2