The flaws in the footprint

I have plenty more heroes to talk about, but first I’d like to address some questions I’ve been posed recently. First, how does what I’m proposing affect or apply to vulnerable places like the Arctic? Second, what makes carbon footprinting in any way right?

OK, I’ve paraphrased a little, but these are the thoughts I’ve been led to. And I think the two are the specific and general aspects of the same thing.

What carbon footprinting (auditing, backpacking, whatever) does is estimate the energy involved in any activity or product. Relativity doesn’t really apply here, but mass of one sort or another does have an equivalent energy, basically what it takes to make or replace something. For example, you can imagine the steps involved in making a wooden rafter (growing, felling, hauling, milling, treatment, etc.) and dealing with the waste.

This makes local, minimalist, low-impact operations more desirable than heavily mechanised ones that involve long-distance shipping. But is that the whole story?

Generally, one gallon of petrol is considered equivalent to any other. But one might have been extracted easily and without displacing people or animals, then refined, shipped and used carefully. Another might have been taken from a corrupt regime, by using armed might to exclude native people, and using processes that pollute and kill.

That’s where the general cynicism comes from: the suspicion that there is no right answer that we can ever approximate. Which is possibly true, except that the primary environmental problem is climate change and it is our energy use that is directly related to human carbon dioxide production.

Having said that, the environment is no our only concern and climate change is not our only environmental problem. If we are going to address sustainability as a whole, we do need other measures: for social justice and the economy. In other words, carbon footprinting is not fundamentally flawed—it does what it is meant to do—but it doesn’t provide a measure for all ills.

At the same time, carbon footprinting is a general measure of environmental impact. Our combined footprints criss-cross over the entire globe, several times over (hence the cliché that we need something like seven planets to support our lifestyle). Parts of those prints are in places that cannot take the impact.

Even the carbon in the most dainty footprint shares its effect with all the others, and parts of the world like the Pacific islands and the Arctic suffer disproportionately from the combined effect.
But there are more specific environmental problems than rising sea levels and changing and increasingly chaotic weather patterns: pollution, disrupted migration routes, imported pests and disease for example. All these have to be taken into consideration, along with the other aspects of sustainability.

Again but: but what this consideration does tell us is that our global carbon footprint has to be reduced by more than enough to save Western civilisation. It has to be reduced by enough, and fast enough, to save the most vulnerable ecosystems.