Ask Lemmy

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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

Individual guilt is never gonna beat organized engineering.

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.

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.

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

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.

1. 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.

2. 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.

3. 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.

4. 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.

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

Also plant some trees.

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.

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

Surely this is satire?

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.

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:

1. We decarbonize energy generation
2. We decarbonize transport
3. We stop generating methane (from industry and farming)
4. 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.

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!

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