This pie graph represents my entire annual carbon footprint. It's a running
tally of all the ways my day-to-day actions produce greenhouse gases that
contribute to climate change, and for better or for worse my footprint is
pretty different than the average person's. So here's a breakdown. My
partner and I live in a small apartment and even before Covid times we've always
worked from home. On a typical day between the lights, the dishwasher, our
computers, and so on, the two of us use nine and a half kilowatt hours of
electricity. That's a bit less than a typical North American apartment, and
it's three times less electricity usage than in a typical standalone home. The
big thing to ask about your electricity is where is it coming from? Now it
depends a lot on where you live but in most places in the U.S.
electricity is generated by burning fossil fuels. It makes up 63% of the
total electricity generated in the country. So the carbon footprint of your
refrigerator is going to be a lot worse if you live in, say,
fossil fuelled Colorado and than in hydro powered Washington. Here in British
Columbia Canada 90% of our electricity comes from hydropower. So my daily use of
electricity only makes up about one percent of my carbon footprint. Of course
electricity is not the only source of emissions from our home. We have a gas
stove top we have hot water and we have heating and air conditioning which is
typically a huge contributor to the emissions of most Canadian homes but our
apartment is weird and awesome. A lot of our heat is actually recovered
heat from sewage at a nearby facility. Our apartment is in one of the most
sustainable buildings in the world and I want to make a video about it at some
point. Also at around 650 square feet our
apartment is nearly four times smaller than the average house being built in
America right now, so our entire home energy footprint is really small. It
makes up only four percent of my carbon footprint. It's worth noting that carbon
footprints are only estimates, and they can go up or down quite a bit depending
on what things you decide to account for. I've tried to be very consistent in this
video, though I hope that if you make it to the end of the
video you'll know that I didn't make this video to brag about my tiny carbon
footprint. The next biggest thing in my carbon footprint is something that's
rarely ever even accounted for and I think it's something that's generally
pretty poorly understood so I didn't have a lot of information to go off of
and this is basically my best guess. When you invest money in something you help
that thing exist. They use your money your capital to help run and grow their
business, and if a company grows you also benefit. The thing is unless you are
really careful about where you're investing your money in it's going to be
funding oil and gas companies. For example experts estimated that investing
ten thousand dollars in the Toronto Stock Exchange index has an annual
carbon footprint of eight hundred kilograms of co2. That's the equivalent
of driving a car 3,000 kilometers. It's complicated and it's different for
everyone and I'm not about to give financial advice but I just want to
acknowledge that my investment footprint is maybe somewhere around 500 kilograms
of co2 per year, even after trying my best to divest from fossil fuels.
Now I've paid someone to do that for me but if you're more financially savvy
then my partner recommends checking out the blog the sustainable economist.
Moving on, I mostly bike. Vancouver is excellent for biking, and we don't
commute, we don't own a car, we do sometimes use car share programs which
are great for big grocery hauls are for going hiking. All tolled I drive about
780 kilometers a year and burn up about a hundred and forty kilograms of
emissions on the road. I also take the ferry a few times a year, and pretty
rarely the bus but the carbon footprint from those vehicles is shared by all the
passengers so that works out to be pretty small for each person. All told my
about town transportation is about 10% of my carbon footprint. In terms of goods
I mostly buy stuff used and I haven't counted that in my carbon footprint. When
I do buy new things, which I absolutely hate doing,
I try to buy high quality stuff that will last as long as
possible. I take care of my things, I repair them, and I use them or wear them
well past when is considered socially acceptable to do so, but still I buy new
shoes and things and that comes with a carbon footprint. It takes energy to get
those raw materials to manufacture them into goods, to ship them to a store near
me, to keep the lights on in the store, and so on. So that's twelve percent of my
carbon footprint. The meal I eat more than any other is a bowl of oatmeal
which i have pretty much every morning. When you consider all the fuel from all
the farm machinery that worked to produce it, the emissions from the
fertilizer the emission from the food processing, this little bit of oats grown
in Saskatchewan have a carbon footprint of around 41 grams of carbon dioxide.
I add some raisins, which is actually the biggest contributor to the bowls
carbon footprint. A scoop of peanut butter, and a dash of Canadian maple
syrup it also takes about 70 kilowatt (edit: WATT hours) hours of electricity for the kettle to
boil the water. All told about 320 grams of carbon dioxide were emitted in order
to make this single bowl of oatmeal. However compared to a breakfast sandwich
of bacon eggs and cheese which comes to a whopping total of one thousand four
hundred and forty-one grams of emissions, my oatmeal breakfast is pretty great. On
average I eat about 2,900 calories of vegan food each day which means that my
annual carbon footprint from my diet is about one and a half tonnes in general
eating a plant-based diet instead of a typical diet of meat and animal products
can slash your carbon footprint from the food you eat in half. I plan to make a
whole video about that soon I'll leave the link when it's done. OK so there's
only one last part of this graph, which is kind of depressing because it makes
up almost exactly half of my annual carbon footprint. The single biggest
contributor to my carbon footprint was a single trip on a plane. Why wasn't that
part of Transportation you ask? Well that's a valid question. Moving on. Anyway,
most years I fly half way across Canada to visit my parents. At the
start of this year I flew to Asia to visit my sister and my partner's family.
Flying is incredibly bad for the climate for a few reasons. I mean it just takes a
lot of energy, a lot of fuel, to get what is essentially a building off the ground
and into the air. And when you burn that fuel high in the atmosphere
it puts greenhouse gases exactly in the place where they do the most damage. Also
airplanes just make it possible to go extremely long distances very cheaply in
a short amount of time. If it always took people two weeks to get from Vancouver
to Tokyo as it does by boat then people wouldn't be doing it on a whim. I refuse
to fly for work, and I don't fly for tourism, I only fly to visit family, and
for the planet I try to space those trips far apart and stay longer when I
go. Still it accounts for half my carbon footprint and that makes it a tough
decision for me. I mentioned at the start of this video that my footprint is not
like the average person's. For comparison, this is the breakdown for the average
Americans carbon footprint. I'm Canadian but this is the data were working with
okay? This fluctuates a little bit depending on what you account for but on
average the typical American emits around 19 tons of carbon dioxide every
year. Now as you can see I'm doing quite a bit better than the average American,
but it would be misleading to just show you this comparison and leave it at that,
so here are some other footprints. The average person in China has a footprint
of around six point four tonnes. Smaller than mine. In India it's only one point
seven tonnes. However if we're going to have any chance of keeping the planet
below two degrees of warming by the end of the century then this is the carbon
footprint but everyone on the planet would have to immediately adopt. And that
brings us to one of the two reasons why focusing solely on changing people's
carbon footprints is fundamentally broken. If I didn't take that trip to
Asia then my carbon footprint would be almost exactly half the size. It would be
pretty close to the best-case scenario for emissions for someone living in Canada,
and it would still be more than double where we need to be. For example it
doesn't matter very much if I drive an electric car
if the electricity for that car is generated by burning fossil fuels. So
frankly unless you're very rich, or you're making some very bad decisions
then focusing on your carbon footprint instead of trying to change the system
through voting or pushing for climate action,
that's just like rearranging the deck chairs on the Titanic. And maybe that's
why the entire idea of the carbon footprint was popularized not by
environmentalists but by the fossil fuel company British Petroleum, which ran a
big ad campaign in 2005 - and that's called misdirection! In order to solve
climate change we need system change, and your carbon footprint does not account
for things like how you vote - and that might be the single most important thing
that you can do for the climate. And the other reason that focusing solely on
carbon footprints just doesn't work is this hold on hold on this circle is the
amount of emissions generated by one single person. This is Paris Hilton's
carbon footprint, and if that looks huge I should clarify this is just her
emissions from flying, which is to say nothing of the emissions from her
millions of dollars of investments or the carbon footprint from her multiple
mansions. I can only speculate but I'd guess it's a lot bigger than this. The
rich skew the average carbon footprint because the richest 10% of the people in
the world are responsible for 50% of the world's emissions. And millionaires and
billionaires have the biggest carbon footprint of them all and they also have
the means of protecting themselves against the worst parts of climate
change, and I doubt this is shocking but they are not holding themselves
accountable. We just can't rely on them to shrink their own carbon footprints, we
can only rely on them to make the average a lot larger. In the West we sort
of want to solve everything through individual
action, and I think maybe that's part of the reason why we are so terribly
failing at taking action on climate. So sure do what you can to have a smaller
impact on the environment to shrink your carbon footprint I'll leave some links
in the video description that might be helpful, I mean that that's great... but if
you are not voting for climate action, if you're not taking serious steps to
change the systems that we live in, then I think you're missing the point.
Thanks for watching.