carbon footprint

83 Bottles of Wine per Person: How Experts Are Calculating the Paris Olympics’ Carbon Footprint

One fact everyone can get behind is that it’s time to reinvent the Olympic Games and mega-events to align them with international climate goals.

The 2024 Paris Olympics aim to be the greenest edition on record, and the first compatible with the Paris climate agreement. Talk of “green games” goes back to April 2021. At the time, the Organising Committee for the Olympic Games (OCOG) had even aspired to carbon neutrality by removing more greenhouse gases from the atmosphere than those generated by the games. However, the reference to net zero was quietly dropped in subsequent communications.

Walking the talk

This begs the question: can the promise of “green games” be kept?

On paper, the Paris Olympics aim to halve the greenhouse gas emissions released by the Rio 2016 or London 2012 Games, estimated at an average 3.5 million tonnes of CO₂ equivalent (Mt CO₂ eq). That’s with the caveat that both games were among the least environmentally friendly in history. There have also been criticisms of the methodology used to calculate emissions, prompting the International Olympics Committee to release a standardised carbon footprint calculation framework for the Olympic games in 2018.

With this in mind, the maximum carbon budget for Paris 2024 has been set at 1.58 Mt CO₂ eq. This is without a doubt an ambitious target, especially when we consider that the Tokyo 2020 Games, organised during a pandemic and without spectators, still generated almost 2 Mt CO₂ eq.

How the Olympics pollute

The biggest emission sources during mega-events are traditionally the transport of participants and the construction of buildings and infrastructure. The 2024 Olympics’ carbon footprint estimated to date breaks down into three relatively equal parts:

Travel by participants and spectators (which should account for a quarter of emissions, including 9% for athletes and officials),
Construction (with approximately 25 % for permanent buildings, including 8 % for temporary infrastructures, and about the same for temporary energy systems, such as generators)
Operations (catering, accommodation, logistics, security, etc), which account for the final quarter)

Naturally, we won’t know the exact carbon footprint of the 2024 Olympics until the event takes place. The quantities and types of construction materials have not been confirmed, and participation figures – currently estimated at around 13 million spectators – remain hypothetical. But the biggest unknown relates to transport. Air travel, potential rail strikes, as well as the delayed launch of four new metro lines set to connect the Paris region could all see emissions soaring.

And that’s without mentioning the the controversial construction of a new motorway junction for the Olympics. Research has long shown that the construction of new road infrastructure generated a lasting increase in traffic.

The Olympics Committee promises that the actual carbon footprint will be published in the autumn, after the games. It is hoped that the calculation of the carbon footprint will be communicated in a transparent and reproducible manner, and that the figure will have been verified by an independent third-party, which corresponds to good practice in terms of environmental reporting.

Greener games, really?

The 2024 Olympics organisers have pursued several avenues to slash emissions, most of which carry shortcomings.

The first resolution has been to limit construction. Of the infrastructure at the 26 competition venues 95% either already existed or is temporary. Any new building has also been designed to emit less CO₂ than the average edifice.

A good eco-design example from the Paris Olympics is the aquatic centre, which boasts a wooden frame, photovoltaic panels on the roof, and seating made from recycled local materials. This last measure makes no difference to the aquatic centre’s carbon footprint, given the relatively small mass of plastic and its carbon footprint per kilogram compared with the mass and carbon footprint of other materials, notably concrete and metals. But the reduction in plastic waste and the positive impact on the local economy ought nevertheless to be applauded.

Set to greet 14,500 athletes during the Olympic Games and 9,000 athletes during the Paralympics, the Olympic village on the northern outskirts of Paris has pledged to a carbon footprint that is 30% smaller by comparison to a conventional construction project. There’s one hitch, however: the chosen benchmark – one tonne CO₂ eq per square metre – seems very high compared with the values found by specialist studies, which estimated the carbon footprint of European buildings in 2022 at 210 kg CO₂ eq per square metre on average over its entire life cycle. Also concerning is the Olympics committee’s lack of specification on whether the target relates to the impact during construction only or over its lifecycle (including the subsequent use of the buildings).

The games are vying to be powered by 100% of renewable energy, including from photovoltaics, geothermal systems, biofuel-powered generators and certified renewable electricity – an option whose carbon benefit is, however, criticised by the scientific community.

In terms of catering, two-thirds of the meals served to fans and half of those for Olympic staff and volunteers will be vegetarian, halving their carbon impact compared with omnivorous meals, and 25% of the products will be local. However, bear in mind that the latter does not guarantee a lower carbon footprint.

Carbon offsets are also on the table. The OCOG is planning to finance reforestation, forest preservation and renewable energy development projects in France and abroad to offset 100% of the greenhouse gases emitted by the event. A commendable commitment, although we ought to note the real impact of carbon offsetting credits is widely disputed by the scientific community.

83 bottles of wine, 31 beef burgers

The research community is divided on the sustainability of mega-events. Some believe that their scale is incompatible with sustainability and that they mainly serve the financial interests and pleasure of the elite. Others see them as an opportunity for innovation, sustainable development and promotion of sustainability.

In concrete terms, the expected carbon footprint of the 2024 Olympics is 1.6 Mt CO₂ eq for 13 to 16 million visitors, or around 100 to 125 kg CO₂ eq per person. This is relatively small compared with the average annual carbon footprint of a European person, which stands at 7.8 t CO₂ eq. For example, 100 kg eq CO₂ is equivalent to the emissions generated by travelling 500 km by car or 10 000 km by metro, or consuming 31 beef burgers or 83 bottles of wine.

But to comply with the Paris Agreement to limit global warming to less than 1.5 to 2°C by 2100 compared with pre-industrial temperatures, we need to drastically limit everyone’s annual carbon footprint to less than 2 t CO₂ eq. It would be fair for rich countries, which are responsible for the vast majority of emissions, to shoulder the bulk of emission cuts.

Researchers have floated several ways to make mega-events more sustainable, from reducing events’ size, staging them in several cities to avoid building new infrastructures, to setting up independent sustainability standards and entrusting their assessment to independent bodies.

One fact everyone can get behind is that it’s time to reinvent the Olympic Games and mega-events to align them with international climate goals. Even better: the games could actively help their host region’s energy and climate transition, such as through urban regeneration. Host cities could use the opportunity of mega events to insulate buildings, deploy renewable energy infrastructure, better public and active transport infrastructure, or create urban leisure areas to lure back city dwellers who hit the road on the weekend to get away from the city. The legacy effects of the 1992 Barcelona Games are a wonderful example of successful urban renewal Paris could draw inspiration from.

Dr Anne de Bortoli’s research is funded by the CIRAIG, a research centre specialising in sustainability metrics at Polytechnique Montréal

This article is republished from The Conversation under a Creative Commons license. Read the original article.

Chart: The Rise (or Fall?) of Vegetarianism

While vegetarianism is expanding slowly in several countries around the world, for example in Europe or the United States, large emerging economies are doing it the other way around.

Whether vegetarianism is pursued with the aim of protecting animals, preserving environmental resources, leading a healthier life or because of cultural traditions, the practice can have a profound influence on health and carbon footprints.

While vegetarianism is expanding slowly in several countries around the world, for example in Europe or the United States, large emerging economies are doing it the other way around. Here, vegetarianism is in decline – for example in India, where traditional vegetarian diets are increasingly swapped for an omnivore approach to eating. While in 2018/19 around a third of urban Indians said they were vegetarians, this decreased to approximately one-quarter by 2021/22. This is according to the Statista Global Consumer Survey.

Vegetarian diets have become more popular in the last three years overall, but some countries are more steadfast than others in their love for meat. In Mexico and Spain, the rate of vegetarians hovered below 3% most recently. The same is true for South Korea, even though here, the rate of vegetarians rose from an extremely low 0.9% in 2018/19.

You will find more infographics at Statista, where this article was originally published.

India’s Push for New Steel Represents Everything Askew With Developmental Ambitions

The steel ministry is pushing for new investments when the country’s production capacity is already higher than its current production and demand.

Earlier this month, the Union minister of steel, Ram Chandra Prasad Singh, inaugurated ‘Steel Week’ at the Indian Pavilion at Expo 2020 in Dubai. The event showcases India’s potential in the sector and invites investors from the UAE, a press release from the Union government said. The event, reflecting India’s push for new investments in the sector, happened against the backdrop of ongoing unrest against a newly proposed steel plant near the Paradip port in Jagatsinghpur district, Odisha.

The aggressive push for new steel represents everything askew with India’s developmental ambitions, its global role in mitigating carbon emissions, its pretence about protecting the rights of Indigenous communities and its regard for public health and safety. Moreover, the steel ministry is pushing for new investments when the country’s production capacity is already higher than its current production and demand.

New plant, old problems

The integrated steel plant, with a production capacity of 13.2 million tonnes per annum (MTPA), will be supported by a 900-MW captive power plant that is proposed to be built by JSW Utkal Steel Limited. The Rs 65,000-crore project will require nearly 3,000 acres of common lands. The project will also have a 10 MTPA cement plant and captive jetties with a handling capacity of 52 MTPA.

The project is proposed to be built at the same site where a South Korean company, POCSO, was to build a steel plant. The memorandum of understanding between POCSO and the Odisha state government, signed in 2005, was greeted with stiff resistance from the locals. The conflict continued until 2016, leaving tens of civilians injured by the state’s security forces.

The movement pushed the National Green Tribunal to relook at the environmental clearance given to the project. In its order in 2016, the tribunal criticised the government for considering only four MTPA in its environmental impact assessment while the project’s capacity was 12 MTPA.

The latest proposal from JSW Utkal Steel Limited has mobilised them once again. Their previous experience with police – the face of state brutality – has left a scar on their collective ethos. Fearing the loss of common lands that would impact their livelihoods, the people of Dhinkia mobilised themselves once again. In January this year, the police resorted to lathi charges, injuring more than 100 people. They also barricaded their village in fear of further police violence.

Dhinkia villagers protest steel factory and police excesses at the proposed site for the JSW factory, Odisha. Photo: Twitter/@MishraKedar1

Flawed environmental clearance

The ghosts of POSCO’s plant have come back to haunt Jindal’s steel plant. Much like POCSO’s environmental impact assessment (EIA), the Centre for Research on Energy and Clean Air analysis of the current project environmental impact assessment reveals its fraught nature.

The EIA compares the three-season average to daily PM10 levels, both of which have different upper limits. This skewed comparison attempts to portray the region’s air ambient quality as cleaner than in reality, allowing them to justify an increased pollution load. In addition, the EIA accounts neither for mercury and other heavy metals generated from its operation nor for the secondary particulate formation of SO2 and NOx.

Paradip, the district where the plant has been proposed, is already amongst the most polluted in the country, classified as ‘severely polluted’ under the Comprehensive Environmental Pollution Index as the particulate matter exceeds the prescribed limits. Emissions from the proposed steel plant will be on par with the entire region’s emission load.

For instance, while the total emission load for SO2 is 43,600kg per day for the entire industrial cluster (including 15 ‘Red’ category industries), the proposed plant alone is estimated to emit around 31,000 kg per day. The plant is expected to emit more than double the region’s current emission load for particulate matter.

Also Read: The Decarbonisation Challenge for India’s Steelmakers

Steel and climate change

This proposed plant is just one of India’s many in the pipeline to double its production capacity by the end of the decade. While the current total crude steel production capacity is 143.91 million tonnes, the National Steel Policy 2017 envisages production of 300 MT by 2030-2031. “It is expected that at the current rate of GDP growth, the steel demand will grow threefold in the next 15 years to reach a demand of 212-247 MT by 2030-31,” it reads. The policy arrived at this number assuming a GDP growth of 7.5%.

The policy justified the urgency of the ministry’s plans thus: “Going forward, the accelerated spend in the infrastructure sector, expansion of railways network, development of domestic shipbuilding industry, opening up of defence sector for private participation, anticipated growth in automobile and capital goods industry and the construction in urban & rural areas, are expected to create significant demand for steel in the country.”

As part of this push, the Union government, on October 20, 2021, announced a production-linked incentive with an outlay of Rs 6,322 crore to be released over the following five years.

The aggressive push for steel flies in the face of India’s carbon commitments and is also not required. In 2020-21, India produced only 96.20 million tonnes of finished steel, which is two-thirds of the country’s capacity. India’s steel consumption is much lower than it produces and nowhere near its production capacity. India’s finished steel consumption between 2016 and 2021 ranged from 83.7 MTPA to 94.1 MTPA, according to the latest annual report of the Steel Authority of India Ltd. Crude steel production ranged between 95.5 MTPA and 110.9 MTPA in the same period.

The energy intensity of the steel sector has shown little change globally. It is still highly reliant on coal – which meets 75% of its energy demand. India’s steel sector is notably worse. While the global average emissions are 1.1 tons of CO2 per tonne of crude steel, India emits two tons of carbon. Being a major economy, India’s unplanned aggressive push for new steel plants can be a setback in the world’s fight against climate change.

“Iron and steel production is the single largest emitter of greenhouse gas emissions contributing to 32% of the total manufacturing sector emissions in India. Driven by the National Steel Policy 2017, the sector is expected to have a three-fold increase in production capacity by 2030,” according to a report by the Council on Energy, Environment and Water.

Steel is considered crucial for India’s economic aspirations as a superpower. However, new steel plants could push the sector into financial disarray – much like the coal industry. Subsequent years of flattened power demand and cheap electricity from renewable sources have stranded assets to the tune of $60 billion. In 2018, a special parliamentary committee estimated that India has about 40 gigawatts of stressed and stranded thermal power assets.

Apart from financial costs, the push for steel profoundly impacts local communities and destroys ancient forests. The people of Dhinkia are still under siege by the police. Moreover, unregulated emissions from the proposed industry are not just a health risk to nearly 25,000 people but also a threat to the region’s vibrant agricultural economy.

The steel sector requires swathes of forests to be cleared for iron ore mining. The push for unnecessary steel, at the cost of these carbon sinks, also exposes India’s approach towards equitable growth, just transition and the earnestness of its efforts to reduce carbon emissions.

India’s steel consumption is projected to grow in the midterm, and the need to increase production capacity could become a necessity. First, however, the sector needs to move away from fossil fuels. Policymakers must consider cheaper, cleaner and future-proof ways to meet the country’s steel demand. Some of these include ramping up scrap steel recycling and investing in green hydrogen as a fuel source. These measures would also safeguard the country from volatile and fluctuating global coal and fossil gas prices.

Prafulla Samantara, who won the Goldman Environmental Prize in 2017, is a social justice activist based in Odisha. He led a 12-year legal battle against Vedanta Resources that proposed to clear 1,660 acres of forestlands to extract bauxite from the Niyamgiri Hills.

Poor Country With Affluent Elite, India Is Going Nowhere

India is now one of the most unequal countries for both income and wealth inequality — and has shown the most rapid increases in inequality.

This piece was first published on The India Cable – a premium newsletter from The Wire & Galileo Ideas – and has been republished here. To subscribe to The India Cable, click here.

The Paris-based World Inequality Lab has become a major source of data on global inequality, based on careful aggregation of national data from a multitude of sources, of both income and wealth inequality, at national, regional and global levels. Their latest World Inequality Report 2022 is an eye-opener, even for those who know that economic inequality has increased massively in recent years. It shows that globally, inequality is now as great as it was at the pinnacle of Western imperialism in the early 20th century. The process began nearly four decades ago, but worsened during the pandemic, which sharply exposed and amplified existing inequalities.

India is now one of the most unequal countries for both income and wealth inequality — and has shown the most rapid increases in inequality. This emerges clearly even though, as the report laments, “Over the past three years, the quality of inequality data released by the government has seriously deteriorated, making it particularly difficult to assess recent inequality changes.” We know that the central government has tended to suppress inconvenient information and manipulate data, refusing to release the results of the 2017-18 national consumer expenditure survey and playing fast and loose with definitions to artificially increase the number of ‘formal’ workers.

Despite these desperate efforts to hide the actual patterns, certain trends are unmistakable. By 2020, the income share of the bottom half of the Indian population was estimated to have fallen to only 13%, while the top 10% captured 57% of national income and the top 1% alone got 22%.

In terms of wealth distribution, the reality is even starker. We know that the past few decades have been a period of increasing wealth concentration globally: the top 1% captured nearly two-fifths of all global wealth growth. The wealth of the top 52 billionaires (which include our home-grown Mukesh Ambani and Gautam Adani) increased by nearly 10% each year between 1995 and 2001. In India, the rate of increase of private wealth and its concentration at the top have been even sharper. The poorest half of the population have less than 6% of the wealth, the top 1% grab more than one-third and the top 10% nearly two-thirds.

The pandemic was a particularly happy period for the extremely wealthy as another recent report on inequality from Oxfam points out — the wealth of the 10 richest men in the world doubled, while 99% of the world’s people are worse off. One of the biggest increases in wealth was that of Gautam Adani, whose wealth multiplied eight-fold during the pandemic, and Oxfam notes that he made use of state connections to become the country’s largest operator of ports and its largest thermal coal power producer, wielding market control over power transmission, gas distribution, and now privatised airports — all once considered public goods (Oxfam 2022, page 20).

The increase in private wealth has been associated with a decline in public wealth, which is bad news for governments wishing to increase spending on citizens based on returns from public assets. For India, the World Inequality Report estimates that the ratio of private wealth to national income increased from 290% in 1980 to 555% in 2020, one of the fastest such increases in the world, throughout history.

India fares badly on other indicators of inequality as well. Women’s share of labour income, at 18%, is around half the global average, according to this novel estimate. This will come as no surprise to those who know how badly India treats its unpaid and underpaid women workers, even as the economy remains critically reliant on their work.

Another shock is the extreme inequality in carbon footprint within the country. On the face of it, India has very low carbon emissions per capita, at 2.2 metric tonnes per person per year. But this masks the fact that the bottom half of the population emits only 1 metric tonne per year, while the top 1% richest Indians emit 32.4 tonnes on average. That’s more than three times the annual average carbon emissions of the bottom half of the US population, and more than six times the emissions of the bottom half in Europe. Controlling the carbon emissions of the Indian rich would contribute greatly to reducing overall emissions, something that is rarely if ever mentioned in discussions by Indian policy makers. Globally and within India, inequality is not just killing people but destroying the planet.

We know that inequality is multidimensional: the income poor are more likely to live in poorer areas, to be women or girls, to belong to socially discriminated castes and communities, to be informal workers. More likely, therefore, to be unable to influence policy. No wonder the World Inequality Report finds that India stands out as a poor and very unequal country, with an affluent elite. Unfortunately, history tells us that such countries rarely progress very much. Radical redirection of policies is therefore essential for any real progress to occur.

Jayati Ghosh is a development economist.

Several Indian States Record Rise in Green Cover, Decline in Carbon Stock

A decline in carbon stock means there is less biomass in the forest. This happens mainly due to deforestation of dense forests and shrinking of trees owing to drought.

In December 2019, the Indian government released its biennial state of forest report highlighting how the country’s forest and tree cover is rising. But a fact that got lost amidst the celebrations was that carbon stock of many states declined over the past two years although they reported a significant increase in their green cover.

A detailed analysis of the Indian State of Forest Report (ISFR) 2019 revealed that several states have reported an overall increase in green cover but their carbon stock has surprisingly dropped substantially over the past two years.

The report showed that states like Maharashtra, Madhya Pradesh, Odisha, Karnataka, Telangana, Tamil Nadu, Andhra Pradesh, Chhattisgarh, Kerala, Uttar Pradesh, Jharkhand have lost a significant portion of crucial carbon stock within the last two years.

The biggest decline, when compared to the ISFR 2017 report, was registered in Karnataka (20%) followed by Madhya Pradesh which lost 15% carbon stock. Chhattisgarh, Maharashtra, Odisha, Kerala, Tamil Nadu, Telangana, Uttar Pradesh, and Gujarat noted a 10 to 14 percent less carbon stock in their forests compared to what they had in 2017.

What is intriguing is that almost all of these states have reported a significant gain in green cover this time – Karnataka (1,025 square kilometres), Andhra Pradesh (990 sq. km.), Kerala (823 sq. km.), Uttar Pradesh (127 sq. km.), Chhattisgarh (64 sq. km.), Madhya Pradesh (68 sq. km.) and Gujarat (100 sq. km.).

The states where carbon stock has gone up are Assam (53%), Himachal (43%), Jammu and Kashmir (40%), Uttarakhand (30 percent) and Arunachal Pradesh (5.6 percent).

Also read: India’s Textile City of Tiruppur is an Environmental Dark Spot

Surprisingly, Arunachal Pradesh, which has the highest carbon stock in India ((1,051 million tonnes), reported a loss of 276 sq. km. forest cover even as its carbon stock rises.

There is no clear answer for such discrepancies except that the entire survey report is botched up, claimed Stalin D, Director of Mumbai-based environment group Vanshakti. He questioned the assessment method of the Forest Survey of India as well. “Forest cover measurement through satellite is a flawed approach. To show us the rosy picture, sugarcane fields and even grassland have been included in forests.”

The ISFR 2019 reveals that the forest cover in India’s northeast region is witnessing a decline and compared to the 2017 data the region noted a decrease of forest cover by 765 sq. km.

The carbon stock refers to the amount of carbon stored in forests in the form of biomass, soil, deadwood, and litter. More the carbon stock, higher would be the forest’s capacity to absorb and sequester carbon dioxide (CO2), the main greenhouse gas in the atmosphere, through photosynthesis. An increase in green cover and carbon stock both indicates a healthy trend and shows India’s better preparedness to deal with the green-house gas which is responsible for global warming.

While releasing the ISFR 2019 in December 2019, India’s environment minister Prakash Javadekar said, “India’s total forest and tree cover has gone up by 5,188 square kilometres as compared to the previous assessment of 2017. Forest carbon stock has also gone up by 42 million tonnes (mt) in the same period. The annual increase in the carbon stock is 21mt, which is equivalent to 78 mt of CO2.”

Overall, India’s green cover and carbon stock both have risen in the last two years.

Decline in carbon stock primarily due to loss of dense forests

Forests are both sources and sinks of carbon. They sequester more carbon than any other ecosystem and hence most important to keep climate change under control.

“Decline in carbon stock primarily occurs due to destruction of dense forests which store maximum carbon. Plantation drives and commercial plantations can make up for green cover but can’t replace the carbon lost in deforestation,” Praveen Rao Koli, chief conservator of forests, Agra region of Uttar Pradesh, told Mongabay-India.

Koli’s argument has a basis. Between 2015-18, India has lost dense forests of the size of Kolkata within four years. As per the official data, over 20,000 hectares of forest area was diverted for mining, thermal power-plants, and infra projects during that time.

Uma Shankar Singh, former Indian Forest Service officer and a carbon stock expert explained that “no amount of commercial transplantation can help replace the carbon stock and ecosystem services the old dense forests offer.” The forests above 70 % canopy are considered very dense and 40-70% is moderately dense

Singh stressed that carbon measurement is flawed, “Carbon assessment is based on the size of plants such as shrubs, herbs, creepers, etc. To get the accurate figures, we need to test all plant species separately which will require massive resources and funds.”

“Moreover, forest degradation due to frequent drought and wildfires also damages the carbon stock. Unfortunately, forest degradation is not part of the assessment,” Singh told Mongabay-India.

Why carbon stock is important?

The Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) estimates that the increase in global mean temperature of the earth’s surface is 0.87 degrees Celsius in 2016 compared to pre-industrial levels in 1900. Predictions are that further increase, that is 1.5 degrees above pre-industrial level, will cause significant variations in climatic patterns over the next century that may have negative impacts on regional and global biomes.

Also read: Govt Gives 30-Year Environment Clearance to Coal Mine Which was Flooded in September

This change in global temperature is caused primarily by rising atmospheric concentrations of greenhouse gases-carbon dioxide (CO2), methane (CH4) and nitrous oxide (N2O). The CO2 accounts for some 65% of the “greenhouse effect”. The rise of atmospheric CO2 concentrations since the beginning of the industrial revolution is mainly credited to the combustion of fossil fuels, cement manufacture, and deforestation.

India, as one of the parties to the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCCC), is supposed to conduct periodic forest carbon assessment to monitor the flow of carbon in different pools in different forests. This becomes all the more important as CO2 emission from India has risen to 2,600 mt CO2 equivalents (eq) from 2,100 mt between 2010-2014, as per the biennial updated report of India submitted to UNFCCC in December 2018.

To tackle the emissions, India has committed to creating an additional carbon sink of 2.5 to 3.0 billion tonnes of CO2 eq by 2030, as per the Paris Agreement of 2015.

Thinning of dense forest and frequent drought affect carbon stock

As per a 2018 research paper, Amazon forests underwent a significant loss of carbon after frequent droughts since 2005 due to tree mortality, disturbance in canopy height and biomass loss. Another study links water scarcity during the growing season (monsoon) with a decline in tree carbon.

In India, the States which reported a drop in carbon stock such as Maharashtra, Andhra Pradesh, Karnataka, Tamil Nadu, and Uttarakhand also faced drought in three consecutive years -2017, 2018 and 2019. Forest experts stress that the availability of nitrogen, phosphorus, potassium and forest management strategies also impacts the capacity of forests to sequester carbon. Insect damage and disease too can negatively impact the stock.

Tropical wet green forests have the maximum per hectare carbon stock (154 tonnes) followed by Himalayan dry temperate forest (152 tonnes), then Himalayan moist temperate (142 tonnes) and subalpine forest (127 tonnes).

Santosh Bajpayi, an environmental activist of Uttar Pradesh, stressed the need for a neutral agency for assessment of forest inventory. “The survey conducted by the forest ministry under the government using a vague technology is likely to show a rosy picture.”

A top forest official of Karnataka said, “The ISFR notes the expansion of forest cover while the international agencies like Global Forest Watch note that India lost 126,000 (1.26 lakh) hectares of forests between 2010 and 2018.”

The article was originally published on Mongabay India. You can read it here.

The Tricky Task of Tallying Carbon

To slow or stop global warming, the world agrees it must cut carbon dioxide emissions. But monitoring each nation’s output of greenhouse gases is not always straightforward.

More than 60 years ago, atmospheric scientist Charles David Keeling began regular measurements of carbon dioxide concentrations in the atmosphere. In the heart of the Pacific and far from the largest human sources of the gas, Hawaii’s Mauna Loa Observatory was an ideal location for these measurements. Within just two years, Keeling had detected two patterns in the data. The first was an annual rise and fall as the seasons came and went. But the second — a year-by-year increase — suggested something alarming: a rise in carbon dioxide produced by the widespread burning of fossil fuels. In 1965, Keeling’s measurements were incorporated into a report for US President Lyndon B. Johnson that described carbon dioxide from fossil fuels as “the invisible pollutant” and warned of its dangers.

Since then, global emissions of carbon dioxide and other greenhouse gases have continued to rise, as have the concerns over the changes that such an atmospheric shift brings. Both of these trends took center stage this week in Madrid, where the United Nations is holding its annual climate change summit, the 25^th Conference of the Parties (COP25).

Can the Indian Film Industry Call Lights, Camera, Climate Action?

At a time when carbon-intensive industries such as energy and aviation are highlighted in the fight against climate change, the film industry is yet to get on board with climate action.

Biswajeet Bora’s 2015 Hindi feature film Aisa Yeh Jahaan not only showcased the alienation of urban denizens from nature but also demonstrated that even the film industry can take action to tackle climate change.

The film was India’s first carbon-neutral film. Bora’s desire to make such a film, together with the work of the Centre for Environmental Research and Education (CERE), made the initial inspiration a reality.

The Mumbai-based CERE, a firm that specialises in environmental sustainability, analysed every activity of the film’s production and pre-production (the planning stages before a film shoot) through the environmental lens. The film’s carbon footprint – the amount of greenhouse gas emissions – was calculated by factoring transportation of people and equipment by air and road, catering, set construction, hotels, and so on.

CERE used scientifically determined emission factors for each activity and calculated the film’s emission as 78.47 metric tonnes of carbon dioxide equivalent (MtCO2e).

With these calculations, the idea was to remove the same amount of carbon produced in making the film, from the atmosphere. CERE recommended offsetting the emissions by planting 560 indigenous trees of a mixed variety. The plantation was done in parts of Mumbai and Assam, where the film was shot, for under a fraction of the film’s budget. The trees were geotagged and monitored for three years as part of CERE’s Urban Afforestation Project.

And so, in 2015, Aisa Yeh Jahaan became India’s first carbon-neutral full-length feature film.

Janjri Jasani, head of sustainability services at CERE, said, “Film and television is a resource-intensive industry. It should use resources efficiently to reduce footprint. Offset when you cannot.”

CERE pitched the idea of a ‘Carbon Neutral Film Certification’ to many other production houses. Unfortunately, one more project later, things didn’t move beyond the pilot. Jasani said, “Production houses may have balked at the cost of offsetting or just not have known enough about the subject (climate change and carbon footprint) to take on this challenge. Given the lack of interest at the time, CERE scaled down its focus.”

The film and television industry is resource-intensive which uses, among other things, high amounts of energy, produces large amounts of waste and burns fossil fuels through transportation. Photo: Silly Entertainment & Media Pvt. Ltd.

Siddharth Nakai, a sustainability consultant with a television network and founder of Greening Advertising Media and Entertainment (GAME), said, “There are straight guidelines and environmental laws for industries. The film and media industry is not seen as a carbon-intensive industry like a manufacturing plant, but it can have a substantial environmental impact because its energy and fuel consumption are at different stages.”

He too admits that it has been tough to make a breakthrough and bag projects that are looking to become sustainable. But he sees mindsets and convenience as the villain here, not money.

Nakai says that the entire process of film pre-production, production, and post-production (e.g., audio/video editing) can work with some guidelines. “For example, in the pre-production stage, one could use eco-fonts to print scripts and documents. These fonts use less ink and save cartridges. On film sets, rechargeable batteries can be used for audio equipment. That saves a considerable amount of use-and-throw batteries that end up at the landfill and make the environment toxic. Waste segregation and zero-plastic bottles on sets are totally possible. These are small things, but gradually, they save a lot of costs.”

Zooming out to the bigger picture, sustainable practices could reduce the environmental impact of film production, which, among other things, uses energy, generates waste, and burn fossil fuels through transportation.

Also read: Leonardo DiCaprio’s ‘Ice on Fire’ Whitewashes Climate Justice, Prompts Backlash

Unrecycled solid and electronic waste at landfills break down and contribute to methane emissions, which is a more potent greenhouse gas as compared to carbon dioxide. The waste sector contributed to three percent of India’s total GHG emissions in 2014.

A 2006 UCLA study found that the US film and television industry created 15 million tons of carbon dioxide in 1999.

Another challenge to making a process such as a film production sustainable is that production can be scattered across long periods and locations. So, it needs the continuous monitoring and support of all stakeholders involved. Nakai recollected, “I’ve once huddled the entire crew…actors, director, workers on set…and explained the rules and the reasons. But if someone decides not to follow something like waste segregation, the effort collapses.”

Efforts to make films production sustainable

There are other ways film productions are trying to make an impact, or rather, reduce it. Cut to Vectar Project, a film-studio in Manchester, United Kingdom that is dedicated to achieving “zero impact filming”. It boasts of an LED-only light setup powered by solar and will build virtual sets with augmented reality to avoid building a physical set. Another proposition is to use an 8K 3D camera setup, which will allow clients and even filmmakers to skip road or air travel to the studio.

A Mexican documentary film Bosque de Niebla (2018) became carbon neutral by compensating its emissions using United Nations-certified carbon reduction credits that allowed the production unit to support solutions against climate change across developing countries.

Vivek Gilani, the founder of CBalance, a Mumbai-based company that helps organisations manage their carbon footprints, expressed concern that there’s a risk of greenwashing in the process. And if someone sincerely takes up the task, he said, “Instead of focusing on every frivolous aspect (of the film production), we can identify the carbon hotspots and work to reduce those.”

Gilani, who is developing the first India-specific GHG emission factor database and hasn’t consulted on film projects, said, “Like how a film production is seen through the lens of other government permissions, actor A or actor B, location A or B, environmental impact and climate change should be a lens too. But first, evaluating the footprint has to be seen as part of the solution.”

Experts say that the film industry needs to be aware of its carbon footprint and take efforts to take a sustainable path. Photo: Kartik Chandramouli

Jasani concurred that producers are free to offset emissions in the way they like, but the industry accounting its carbon footprint is essential. She said, “Offsetting with trees is a slow process and can take over 15 years to achieve. It has to be done on degraded land and forests and not habitats like grasslands. Tree planting is not the solution for all environmental issues, but they provide a lot of other ecological services.”

As the entertainment industry is projected to grow in India, its resulting emissions and waste are bound to rise too. Gilani said, “The industry should recognise and declare the issue.” He hopes that climate change soon finds its place in film scripts, even if it is not the story. “Someone in the film can maybe miss a flight because of an extreme weather event,” he joked.

There are faces in the film industry who are vocal about environmental issues, and Jasani believes it would be encouraging if they speak up and have conversations about its impact.

“Many would complain that it is for publicity, but as long as the work is done efficiently, the environment benefits. That is what matters,” Jasani added.

This story was published on Mongabay. Read the original here.

A Swedish Royal Visit, Fighter Jets and Stubble Burning

When will we be able to engage with Bioendev and other similar companies with same confidence, objective and clarity that we deploy to engage with Saab International?

King Carl XVI Gustaf and Queen Silvia of Sweden are undertaking a week-long state visit to India starting today (December 2).

The royal couple will be accompanied by quite a few Swedish business representatives and have a packed agenda. This visit is an interesting reason to examine India’s engagement approach with two Swedish companies.

These two companies can’t be more divergent in their nature of businesses. The first is Saab International, which has responded to the Indian government’s 2018 tender to supply 114 multi-role combat planes. Saab has aggressively pitched its star product – Gripen fighter jet on an “extremely cost effective” platform through a partnership with a domestic company and offers to manufacture Gripen in India. The company is in a race with four other contenders for this contract, all of which are without doubt some of the best fighter jets that the world currently offers. The multi-billion dollar scale of this contract makes it a mouthwatering opportunity for all these five players to put their best foot forward.

The state visit of Swedish royal couple can therefore be construed as a courtship effort for the Gripen.

The installed expertise of defense procurement framework of India to execute such a contract – controversies not withstanding – is competent. After all, India’s annual defense outlays is among the world’s largest. When procurement process is subjected to such vast outlays and exposes you to the best of technology and capabilities that money can buy from Israel to US and from France to Russia, the ability to source the “best” on your terms can’t be questioned.

It is this heft that also allows India to imagine the rise of a domestic defense industry through partnerships with technology leaders like Saab with the aim to not only satiate the country’s thirst at a cheaper cost but also of its friends.

Also read: Sweden Joins EU, US in Calling for Removal of Restrictions in Kashmir

Domestic private capital is already wide awake and going after this opportunity with all guns blazing to get a pie of this action, while public market keeps a close eye to spot the next multi-bagger in the nascent but growing sector. Only time will tell whether the royal visit of the King and Queen of Sweden was fruitful to Saab and its Indian partner or not.

This brings us to the second Swedish company that will putting up its skills on display in Mohali, Punjab in the presence of the royal couple and Prime Minister Narendra Modi. The company is Bioendev, which recently signed an MOU with National Agri-Food Biotechnology Institute, Mohali in a 50:50 partnership with Government of India.

The “pilot” project will produce ‘green coal’ with paddy straw and without any carbon footprint. This green coal can then be used as ‘energy pellets’ – a cool technology indeed to solve the problem of stubble burning that ensues air pollution in North India every winter. It is hoped that this pilot project will include in its scope the mechanism for the stubble to be collected, aggregated and shipped to such a facility when this venture is ready to be scaled up for a wider deployment.

A farmer burns the stubble in a rice field in Karnal in Haryana, October 9, 2018. Photo: Reuters/Adnan Abidi

Such optimism aside, India’s approach in how it engages with Bioendev is in sharp contrast to that it takes with Saab. This exposes us as a society with misplaced priorities.

With Saab, our ambition is clearly stated in the language of money, backed by technical competence to seek the best solution available. We are sure of our challenges and Saab is leaving no stone unturned to impress upon us that Gripen is the best suitor to address them. Businesses are chiseling their plans; the public market is following the opportunity like a hawk and there is hope that the opportunity will become a supplier of high quality jobs.

But Bioendev emerges more as a tutor who has been extended an invitation to teach us and show us the path out of our misery. We merely stand as helpless students with no will or imagination to fight and solely rely on the tutor to pull us out of our abyss. The quantum of paddy waste stands at 35 million tonnes per annum and that is by no means a small scale.

But, the engagement model with Bioendev is a pilot exploration in an academic setting. No doubt the plant is big, the technology cool and the step right but just contrast this engagement with Saab in which everything from procurement to technology, from capital to stated outcome is defined, certain and assured. The engagement with Bioendev and other similar companies is a far cry from this clarity. Neither there exists any domestic private capital chasing Bioendev nor is the public market keeping an eye on the pilot.

Also read: Over Half of India’s Coal-Fired Power Plants set to Miss Emission Norm Deadline

We are still piloting our solutions when it comes to pollution, whereas this new enemy is now claiming lives and destroying ecology at a scale and intensity that is far more sinister than the perceived threat from our neighbours.

When can we engage with Bioendev with same confidence, objective and clarity that we deploy to engage with Saab? The answer lies in a refreshed template of policy design that can prioritise the issue of pollution at par if not greater than the need to buy a Gripen.

We need the disposition of urgency and clarity that can state our challenges with pollution and sanitation in the language of economics and scientific excellence. We need to think of these challenges as an opportunity to address our perpetual struggle with job creation and economic growth. We need to appreciate that we can convert these challenges into multi-billion dollar formal sectors that can become darlings for formal capital. This is not an out-of-ordinary wish list because this is exactly what Sweden has done in the last three decades that allows it to offer Bioendev as a tutor to India.

In the 1970s, Sweden used to produce 2.3 million tonnes of garbage every year and dumped 70% of this garbage in open landfills (to put this in perspective, India generates more than 60 million tonnes of garbage annually).

Also read: Will India Need a Landfill the Size of Bengaluru By 2030?

Today, Sweden produces 4.3 million tonnes of garbage (nearly doubled) and recycles every bit of it. Not an iota of this garbage gets dumped in open landfills because they are banned and the entire waste of the country get supplied as a precious resource for its booming resource recovery industry. So, important has this industry become to Sweden that it now imports garbage from other countries to keep the wheels of this industry well-oiled and running.

One metric for India to chase is to emulate Sweden to address our issues of sanitation and pollution. Therefore, engagement with Bioendev even if it is as a tutor-student relationship is a necessary start. But the pursuit should be to develop our ability that can allow us to engage with Bioendev and other similar companies on the same framework that we deploy to engage with Saab and in this ability also lies our success in solving the issue of sanitation and pollution.

In that regard, perhaps the next Royal visit by the King and Queen of Sweden to India will more be a courtship for Sweden’s resource recovery industry than a teaching lesson.

Ankur Bisen is the author of Wasted: The Messy Story of Sanitation in India, A Manifesto for Change, recently published and released by Pan MacMillan India.

The Idea That ‘Green Technology’ Can Help Save the Environment Is Dangerous

Industrialists around the world have been extracting a wide array of minerals and metals to build electric vehicles and ‘cleaner’ batteries, simply replacing one injustice with another.

“Listen to the science,” they insist. Public support for climate action has been burgeoning around the globe, with lakhs of people in various countries demanding governments act now to stave off the worst effects of the climate crisis. Governments and corporations have been responding by announcing substantial commitments to forge cleaner paths into the future.

But in all this clamour, two dangerous ideas fester.

The first is the legitimisation of further emission of greenhouse gases, at least until around 2050. This is curious considering scientists have presented evidence that the powers that be should act now, not later. Experts have also said many scientific reports on the subject might even have underestimated the risk of delayed action. So why the delay?

A part of it is rooted in buying time to allow the global energy sector to transition from fossil fuels to cleaner alternatives, such as renewables like wind and solar power. Most of the loudest voices demanding protective, adaptive and rehabilitative climate action have supported the need for such a transition – including proponents of the ‘Green New Deal’ in the US, Extinction Rebellion campaigners protesting near oil fields, the UN Intergovernmental Panel for Climate Change and international activists like Greta Thunberg.

But as it happens, the idea that ‘green technology’ can help save the environment is dangerous because it glosses over the alternatives’ ills. In a bid to reduce the extraction of hydrocarbons for fuel as well as to manufacture components for more efficient electronic and mechanical systems, industrialists around the world have been extracting a wide array of minerals and metals, destroying entire ecosystems and displacing hundreds of thousands of people. It’s as if one injustice has replaced another.

The Republic of Guinea in equatorial Africa hosts 30% of the world’s bauxite reserves as well as large quantities of iron ore. Some 98% of the country is also covered by forests. Aluminium from bauxite is required to make electric cars and high-capacity electric cables. Steel is the most commonly used metal and is used to make windmills and for structural use in urban infrastructure. Imagine the plight of Guinea’s forests in the face of rising demand for both these materials.

The Congo, its neighbour, is home to 60% of the world’s cobalt. This metal is a critical component of batteries that power smartphones and electric vehicles. Contractors are thought to employ some 35,000 children, forced to work in pitiable conditions, to extract this metal. The mines erected to service this industry have destroyed large tracts of savannah and agriculture land and eliminated the livelihoods of thousands. As the demand for cobalt increases, as it is bound to, the Congo’s rainforests are likely to be the next big casualty.

It’s a similar story across Africa, the continent with the most mineral reserves. As the rest of the planet decides to shift to alternate sources of power and redesigns its technology to accommodate new batteries and other components, Africa’s countries bear the brunt of the mineral-extraction drives that will follow. The continent is already struggling with the effects of the climate crisis, including large-scale food shortage, biodiversity loss and disease epidemics.

Countries like Guinea and the Congo might initially benefit from the sale of mining licenses but they also place themselves at risk of environmental as well as political disruption.

For example, salt flats 3,600 meters above sea-level in Bolivia and Chile hold nearly half of all the lithium in the world. Lithium is another important metal required to manufacture energy storage devices. (This year’s Nobel Prize for chemistry was awarded to researchers who invented the lithium-ion battery.) But the rush to control Bolivia’s resources quickly destabilised the local socialist government, which had intended to regulate mining and distribute profits among the population. The right-wing government in place now is likely to reopen negotiations with foreign mining companies that its predecessor had nixed.

Water is already quite scarce in the xeric environments of these countries. In addition to contamination from tailing ponds attached to copper and lithium mines, up to 75% of the available water in some of these locations has been diverted for mining.

The trail of destruction doesn’t stop with extractive industry. Going from raw materials to usable components also requires resources, especially – and curiously – fossil fuels.

According to one estimate, one wind turbine requires 900 tonnes of steel, 2,500 tonnes of concrete and 45 tonnes of plastic. For every tonne of steel produced, 780 kg of coal is used during the extraction phase. The production of every tonne of concrete emits 1.25 tonnes of carbon dioxide.

In the same vein, conventional methods of solar panel manufacturing release nitrogen trifluoride, a greenhouse gas 17,200-times more potent than carbon dioxide and with an atmospheric tenancy of over seven centuries. High-voltage power generation and transmission requires the use of sulphur hexafluoride, which is 23,500-times more potent than carbon dioxide and lingers in the atmosphere for a millennium. Leaks of this gas in the European Union and the UK in 2017 alone amounted to equivalent emissions from 1.7 million cars.

While activists, experts and others demand greener sources of energy, their thirst for energy itself hasn’t abated. This, together with weakening regulations and rising income inequality, will ensure the problems described thus far will only become more entrenched.

Currently about 8% of the world’s electricity comes from solar and wind power. Different analysts expect demand will rise by 7-20 times in the next 30 years. Each unit of increase will precipitate disproportionate consequences for countries supplying the resources, such that the direct impact of large-scale conversion to renewable energy technology on ecosystems and land-bases could be as significant – if not larger than – climate change itself. Moreover, the wear and tear of infrastructure will require replacements in two or three decades, triggering more toxic gold-rushes.

Recycling is also energy-intensive and can often salvage only a fraction of spent resources. For example, the world produces about 360 million tonnes of plastic a year but only about 9% of all plastic waste is recycled. If production continues to grow at its current rate, recycling a tenth of it will soon be rendered meaningless. (Factoid: we extract about 70-times as much minerals from the ground every year.)

Myopic planning and assessment, and not understanding that industrial solutions are inherently unsustainable have led us, among other things, to our planet-wide crisis. And inexplicably, we’re making a lot of the same mistakes again. Just as urgently as international protest marches have demanded that governments act, the protestors must also decouple the climate conversation from alternative technologies. Otherwise, the prevailing rhetoric will only endanger more lives.

Instead of resorting to industrial or, more broadly, techno-optimistic alternatives, we need to immediately reduce our industrial footprint by more than half and adopt alternative ways of living and working. This is also possible and will likely benefit Earth more than everything else we seem to be trying.

Godwin Vasanth Bosco is an ecologist working to restore forests and grasslands in the Nilgiri mountains of South India. He is the author of Voice of a Sentient Highland (2019).

Qatar’s Outdoor Air Conditioning Is Not the Real Climate Villain

If we’re concerned about who’s “making it worse” for Qataris, it would be shortsighted to ignore the West’s historically high emissions.

Climate change is coming for everyone, but it’s coming much faster for some of us. People living in low-income communities are more likely to be affected by storms and floods exacerbated by climate change. Low-lying portions of island nations like the Maldives are projected to be uninhabitable by 2100, and researchers worry that the combination of high temperatures and humidity levels in South Asia and the Persian Gulf could make those regions virtually unliveable.

Qatar, in particular, has recently been the subject of interest in Western media. A recent Washington Post piece reported that Qataris have taken to air conditioning outside spaces, like restaurant patios and sports stadiums built for the 2022 World Cup. Air conditioning, the author wrote, is a “vicious cycle” – the energy required to run AC outdoors requires emissions, which in turn feeds climate change. GQ picked up the news, calling it “environmental lunacy.” One popular tweet linking to the piece says that by running air conditioning, Qataris are “making the heat worse as they try to cool off.”

This is a convenient narrative for Westerners. It fits into the existing framework of North American discourse about climate change (hot places will get hotter!), and readers in cooler climes get to feel concerned, but in a self-righteous way – wow, look how bad things are getting all the way over there, and how those other people are making it worse for themselves!

Individual decisions do, in the aggregate, contribute to change. But telling people in 120-degree weather to avoid outdoor air conditioning obscures the real emissions culprits.

Outdoor air conditioning is nothing new. North Americans have used it for years in desert cities like Phoenix to make sitting outside bearable. As far back as 2008, Gizmodo’s Adam Frucci mocked outdoor air conditioners as “perhaps the most wasteful and idiotic product I’ve ever seen,” and in 2011, Phoenix restaurants began advertising air-conditioned patio tables. A 2015 trend piece recommends outdoor air conditioning for Arizona homeowners who “love their outdoor lifestyle” and want a solution for when “it gets a little too hot to sit outside on the covered patio.” Elsewhere in North America, patio sitters have the opposite problem: It’s too cold. Patio heaters, open fires, and gas- or electric-powered fire pits make sitting outdoors cosier.

While there are no direct comparisons of energy use between outdoor air conditioning and outdoor heating, both are inefficient. Valerie Thomas, a professor at Georgia Tech who studies energy and sustainable infrastructure, says calculating efficiency depends on the specific technology used as well as how often and for how long it’s used. A small patio heating system operates at about 1,000 watts and costs about $140, while larger units are 1,500 watts and cost around $200, says Thomas. She didn’t look into electric outdoor air conditioners specifically but says that most common patio-cooling devices, like swamp coolers or fans, use between 200 and 250 watts.

Based on that, Thomas says, “very, very approximately one might conclude that heating is somewhat more energy intense than cooling.” Yes, swamp coolers and fans aren’t the same as AC, but it appears some “high performance” portable air conditioners also use around 1,500 watts too. Yet amid discussions of climate change impacts in the US, I haven’t seen any hand-wringing over how Arizonans’ use of air conditioning or Californians’ use of patio heaters is “making it worse for themselves.”

There’s plenty of discussion about how wasteful indoor air conditioning can be; Americans, in particular, tend to leave AC on all day, and the nation’s bad habits around cooling account for more emissions than the rest of the world’s cooling costs combined. There’s even evidence that Arizonans’ air conditioning habits are making it worse for them; a 2014 study found that air conditioners could raise nighttime temperatures in Phoenix by 2 degrees Fahrenheit. But in some cases, Qatar’s outdoor air conditioning might even be more efficient than traditional indoor air conditioning.

Also read | Climate Crisis: Meet Paris’s First Chief Resilience Officer

Standard heating, ventilating, and air conditioning systems attempt to cool air in an enclosed space; that can be incredibly costly in enormous sports arenas like the Dallas Cowboys’ AT&T Stadium, which draws more energy than some midsize cities. Alternatively, the methods used in Qatar’s stadium designs focus on cooling the individual. The stadium cooling system’s designer claims that his invention uses just one-fifth the energy typically used to heat an airport atrium of around the same size, though there are no independent verifications of that calculation.

But let’s assume these outdoor cooling methods are woefully inefficient. Even then, how much Qataris are actually contributing to this “vicious cycle” of emissions is an open question. “Qatar emits a lot of greenhouse gases,” writes Post reporter Steven Mufson, noting that the country has the highest per capita emissions rate. “About 60 percent of the country’s electricity is used for cooling. By contrast, air conditioning accounts for barely 15 percent of U.S. electricity demand and less than 10 percent of China’s or India’s.” Comparing Qatar’s emissions or energy use to that of the US, China or India implies that these countries might be, well, comparable – but they are not.

Qatar is about the size of Connecticut and is home to about 2.6 million people. (Connecticut’s population, by the way, is around 3.5 million.) It’s responsible for less than 1% of global emissions, says Eri Saikawa, an associate professor at Emory University who studies emissions. “Qatar’s emissions as a whole are very small,” she told me. And the energy devoted to cooling makes sense too, considering the weather. “It seems a bit like an unfair comparison to me,” she says.

Consider this chart from Climate Watch for a visual representation of how the United States’ total emissions have dwarfed Qatar’s for 25 years; the default settings for the y-axis make it look like Qatar’s emissions are essentially zero compared with the roughly 6.0 gigatons the US emits each year. Just comparing the most recent figures, from 2014, Qatar emitted 88 megatons, while the US emitted 6.3 gigatons (equivalent to 6,300 megatons) – Qatar’s emissions were just 0.01% of the United States’.

It’s true that, as Mufson writes, Qatar has the highest per capita emissions rate. According to data from the World Bank, the average Qatari produces 2.74 times the emissions of an average American and nearly 5.8 times that of an average Chinese citizen. But that’s not all, or even mostly, because of cooling costs – the large amounts of liquefied natural gas the country exports count as Qatar’s emissions footprint, rather than that of the countries to which it exports, like China and India.

Also read | Venice, the Apocalypse and an Opera

If we’re concerned about who’s “making it worse” for Qataris, it would be shortsighted to ignore the West’s historically high emissions. The six countries with top emissions in 1850 – the US, the EU, China, Germany, India and Russia –are still top emitters. Between 1990 and 2014, the US and Canada topped the list of the world’s biggest per capita emitters. “The US has been emitting so much that they have some responsibility to bear for historical emissions,” says Saikawa.

The cumulative contributions of these high-emitting countries are many tens of thousands of times what Qataris are using annually to stay cool. Even if Qataris completely stopped using air conditioning, it would take a long time for the change to make an impact, says Saikawa. “If they are going to stop for a hundred years, of course, that could potentially count, but in the current grand scheme of things, there is so much more we can do,” like reducing coal-based emissions and more effectively using solar energy.

The Qataris have considered this. In the Post piece, the author interviews Abdulla al-Mannai, director of the Qatar Meteorology Department.

“I often get asked: ‘Can we reverse whatever is happening in the climate?’ ” Mannai said in an email. “I ask: Can you turn off air conditioning and refrigeration and stop using cars? Nobody will say yes.”

“Nobody” includes all of us, not just Qataris. Christopher Groves, a research fellow at Cardiff University, has studied energy justice and the role of identity and culture in people’s energy use. One paper he wrote in collaboration with other Cardiff researchers features an interview with a woman named Lucy from Wales who uses the opposite of the Qataris’ kind of outdoor climate control: a patio heater. Lucy had moved from the city into the country and said she knew the heater was wasteful, but she wanted her friends from the city to come visit and feel at home.

“Ways of using energy that might otherwise be seen as wasteful are – in Lucy’s case but also in the Qatari context – seen as justifiable because of the ways they symbolise material abundance and luxury,” says Groves. “There are situations where waste is seen almost as morally necessary to support a valued way of life.”

Groves asks if it’s fair to ask people to give up these values – and, more importantly, what might convince people to change their behaviour. Lucy, for instance, mentioned that her neighbours also used wasteful means of heat production, like burning wood in open fires, and that those practices were part of the community. “Motivation for giving that up has to come, ideally, from within the community to which someone has essential attachments,” says Groves. “Simply demanding, from an external vantage point, that things have to change generally doesn’t work.” Giving up these pieces of identity “can be psychologically difficult.”

Also read | The Climate Crisis Is No Longer Your Grandchildren’s Problem. It’s Yours.

There’s been plenty of ink spilled suggesting that people forgo wasteful outdoor AC or shaming people for flying, eating meat, using plastic, buying new clothes, and using medically necessary inhalers or any number of inefficient but ubiquitous technologies out there, but the collective impact is still a drop in the bucket and, as Groves notes, unlikely to work without large-scale buy-in.

A 2017 report found that more than 70% of the world’s emissions since 1988 were traceable to just 100 companies. Comparatively, whether someone runs an outdoor air conditioning unit for an hour during a restaurant meal seems like a drop in a vast ocean of emissions.

What you can do: vote, organise, educate and, in whatever way you can, create dialogue around solutions that address systemic issues like moving away from coal-based power and incentivising more sustainable infrastructure investments. That’s not to let you off the hook for examining your own energy consumption. But policing others’ isn’t going to get us very far, both from the perspective of generating meaningful behavioural change or significant emissions reductions.

This piece was originally published on Future Tense, a partnership between Slate magazine, Arizona State University, and New America.