This is the age old false dichotomy between personal use (minuscule percentage of green house gasses) versus agricultural/commercial use (the actual elephant in the room).
Commercial and residential GHG emissions are significant. Yes we should absolutely be doing more to curb emissions from ag/industry, but we shouldn't pretend that it's not also worth addressing restaurants and homes.
Maybe read before you make a statement about how "a quick google tells me?" The parent comment reference to "personal use (minuscule percentage of green house gasses) versus agricultural/commercial use" is not comparable to the linked paper's "household consumption," a "consumption category" that includes things like agriculture and manufacturing, see excerpt below.
On the global level, 72% are related to household consumption, 10% to government consumption (compared to a 16% share in global GDP), and 18% to investments (compared to a 21% share in global GDP). Nutrition is the most important consumption category, with food accounting for nearly 20% of the GHG emissions. Because we include the supply chain in our analysis, methane and nitrous oxides from agricultural production play a significant role. “Shelter”, the operation and maintenance of residences, causes 19% of the emissions, most of it related to the direct energy consumption by the buildings. Unlike the convention in household environmental impact studies (8), the sectoral detail in the GTAP data did not allow us to allocate furniture or cleaning products to the category of shelter; they are rather grouped under manufactured products. The construction of buildings is mostly allocated to investments, together with the construction of infrastructure. Construction accounts for 10% of the CF globally. Mobility for private households accounts for 17% of the emissions. Almost half of this is caused by fuel combustion by private motorists. Other important contributors are the production of motor vehicles and the purchase of air and land transport services. Freight transportation is allocated to consumed products and not private mobility. Services apart from wholesale and retail trade margins account for a total of 16%, where “public administration, defense, health, and education” is by far the most important with 11%. Trade margins account for 5.5% and represent the accumulated emissions from distribution between the producer and final consumer. Manufactured products cause a total of 13% of the CF, whereas clothing represents 2.8%, machinery and equipment account for 5%, followed by the household consumption of chemical products and the consumption of electronic equipment.
I did read it. 19% of global emissions from household power and 17% from mobility (cars and such) is not miniscule, and not agricultural/commercial usage.
We should be approaching the problem from all avenues, so I agree. But this campaign that ordinary people shouldn't arsed to do anything because it won't make a difference is absurd.
I can't be arsed to do it, not because it won't make a difference, but because I have no ability to know that an alleged lower-carbon product is actually lower-carbon, and not just marketing bullshit and accounting trickery.
Encoding it in cost is the only metric that the manufacturer won't be able to game.
It's the only honest, guaranteed signal for any product. Making purchasing decisions based on it is the whole point of market economies.
Tax carbon at the same cost as it takes to pull it out of the air[1], and consumers will start buying low-carbon alternatives.
[1] You should also probably take that money, and actually pull it out of the air, though.
“Minuscule” or not, it doesn’t matter. Every molecule of CO2 & other greenhouse gases avoided now is worth dozens or hundreds or more that we’ll have to recapture via carbon capture in the future if we want to prevent a climate disaster.
Imagine a some shady company building a dam, and due to their shitty practices the dam failed, there's a huge flood destroying whole cities, and you're blaming the person above you, because he pissed in the water. Yes, technically every mililiter of liquid matters, but we all know who the real culprit is, and shifting the blame to someone who likes good food, instead of the major puluters is a bad thing to do.
The amount of carbon a gas stove emits, like plastic straws, plastic bags, and all manner of bans the eco-activists are forcing on society, is so infinitesimally small compared to the airplanes the same activists and politicians use to jet around the country. It's completely laughable and totally absurd. I'm so utterly tired of virtue signaling in all aspects of society. We put insane amounts of effort into things that do nothing, then ignore all of the huge issues because those issues are hard and don't fit into a neat tweet.
Okay, now how much carbon does the entire gas infrastructure used to pipe that gas around emit, and the gas used to heat homes? Because as long as people are going to specifically demand gas stoves, all that infrastructure still has to exist, and gas heating is going to be attractive because the gas hookup is already there.
The fossil fuel industry specifically uses gas stoves as a gateway to push people towards using more gas (see the old “cooking with gas” campaign for example). This is about countering that messaging.
(And besides, we know more about the health impacts of gas stove use now too; there are more direct health reasons you’d want to avoid them in addition to the climate impacts.)
We already have the infrastructure and it works great. How about solve the planes and container ships then we can work our way down to the things that barely matter?
> The U.S. Environmental Protection Agency estimates that in 2019, methane emissions from natural gas and petroleum systems and from abandoned oil and natural gas wells were the source of about 29% of total U.S. methane emissions and about 3% of total U.S. greenhouse gas emissions.
> Eco-Cycle is unable to provide any data to back up this number, telling Reason that it was relying on the research of one Milo Cress. Cress—whose Be Straw Free Campaign is hosted on Eco-Cycle's website—tells Reason that he arrived at the 500 million straws a day figure from phone surveys he conducted of straw manufacturers in 2011, when he was just 9 years old.
> Cress, who is now 16, says that the National Restaurant Association has endorsed his estimates in private correspondence. This may well be true, but the only references to the 500 million figure on the association's website again point back to the work done by Cress.
Ah yes, when the news disagrees with your worldview attack the source. The article is well-researched with plenty of links, but your response is expected.
You can say that, but Reason is still not generally seen as credible. If we ignore credibility, we can say and on the Interet we can find support for anything.
