This sounds like a lot of work. However, some companies are eager to help us:
Bon Appétit Management Co. rolls out its new Low Carbon Diet in 400 cafes it runs at university and corporate campuses around the country. Chicken, it turns out, has a lower carbon footprint than beef.
This is a front page article in the L.A. Times. And for the first time that I can remember, on the front page, there is a pictorial sequence - of the carbon footprint of cheese. (On the Internet I could not find this excellent diagram.) Here is the sequence representing the footprint of cheese:
1 - Factories manufacturing fertilizer use a fuel-intensive process that emits CO2
2 - Excess fertilizer applied to fields produces nitrous oxide, which has 296 times the warming potential as CO2
3 - Corn, used for feeding cows, is harvested, processed, trucked and stored, all of which use CO2-emitting equipment
4 - A cow belches annually 145 pounds of methane, which has 23 times the warming potential of CO2
5 - Refrigeration, production and packaging of cheese use CO2-emitting equipment
6 - Transporting the cheese requires refrigeration equpment as well as vehicles that emit CO2
7 - At the supermarket, the cheese is displayed in CO2-emitting containers
8 - Consumers travel to food stores and then go home and store the cheese in a refrigerator, and both activities emit CO2
9 - Cheese that is thrown out gets to a landfill which generates methane and CO2
Bon Appétit Management Co. deserves a lot of credit for determining food carbon footprints and using this information to decide what food to sell. Hamburgers are out, vegetables are in. Imagine the courage it takes to remove hamburgers from the menu. But they are doing it. I hope other companies in the food industry as well as in other industries will follow this example.
Solving global warming can not be accomplished through technology, taxes (regardless of the type), political action or by any other top-down means. These things are necessary, but not sufficient. Global warming can only be solved if we get individual citizens to participate. Calculating carbon footprints is a great way to start.
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