The annual carbon budget of each person is about 3 tons per person.
Thats the amount planet's biosphere can process divided by number of peoplle.
Thats the amount planet's biosphere can process divided by number of peoplle.
To put that stat in perspective, the average carbon emmisions per person [0]:
Qatar is almost 40 tonnes pp
United States, Canada, Australia is about 15 tonnes pp
Switzerland, France, Italy, under 5 tonnes pp
South Sudan is about 0.13 tonnes.
It really puts in perspective how much wasteful carbon reduction and lifestyle changes are needed for us to have any reasonable expectation at curbing this.
Edit: added source
[0] https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/co-emissions-per-capita
The roads are a big part of that in the US. American suburban car dependency needs to die.
All construction activities including roads, account for about 10.6% of emissions.
For comparison energy use inside buildings accounts for 17.5% of emissions. Transport emissions (Land, Air, water) account for 16.2%.
There are absolutely lifestyle choices at play here: Size of houses, size of car engines, car tonnage, commute distances, Travelling/Shopping habits.
We cannot change minds and infrastructure overnight, the second best thing we can do at a policy level is to (magically) find ways for our energy production to not depend on coal/natural gas.
The more spread out people are, the further water, electricity, gas, sewage, trash, food, human bodies, and everything else has to travel. Energy is mass times acceleration times distance.
In other words, detached single family homes with garages and 2 cars driveways on a quarter acre lot preclude any environmentally conscious changes one could make, barring the miraculous discovery of some new technology that supplants fossil fuels. Or drastic reductions in population.
The simple, but not politically viable, solution is to increase fossil fuel taxes so much that it forces people to give up detached single family homes and individual cars and move into apartment or rowhouses so that public transit can be implemented.
Do you have a source for this claim?
All I have read until now points to a majority of individual emissions associated with vehicle emissions and Energy usage for Heating/Cooling houses/offices. I am all for a vegetarian lifestyle for animal welfare sake but I feel this focus on Agricultural emissions is misleading or at least misreported.
If you move a load of produce in a truck, do the truck emmissions get counted as "transport" or "agriculture"? I guess depending on your angle, you could say either.
The paper you link includes CO2 'equivalent' emissions, i.e. they are including NOx from diesel engines and Methane from oil/gas extraction and calculating some CO2 equivalent volume. Whereas the source I referenced is only including CO2 emissions.
i.e it's not that common French is more carbon economical than a Canadian - she just happen to have been born in a place with established nuclear power generation.
In other words - this stat means nothing.
https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/co-emissions-per-capita?t...
The trend is almost binomial, many of these countries have marginal nuclear use.