The Next Steps: Food and Flying

You’ve worked your way through all the steps here. You get a high five, gold star, and an ice cream sundae if you want to go buy yourself one. But if you want to get all the way to the top of the class? You probably need to deal with two other issues: food and flying.

In quantitative terms, these tend to be the biggest items you can tackle to reduce your climate footprint once you’ve dealt with your home and your car (if you have one). The typical American diet results in greenhouse gas emissions equivalent to more than 1.7 metric tons of carbon dioxide per year — not that much below the 2.29 metric tons on average for heating a home with natural gas, and more than 10% of the average 15 metric tons emitted annually per person in the United States as of 2018. Flying can be pretty variable, but you can use the International Civil Aviation Organization calculator to run your own numbers; I can tell you that for my household, our usual air travel to visit extended family spread out across the country adds up pretty quickly to a sizeable portion of our climate footprint. You may have noticed, however, that I don’t have the “when” and “how” precisely mapped out here for food or flying. It’s a different reason for each.

An Apple a Day Keeps Climate Change Away

For food (and consumption of goods more generally), there simply aren’t three easy steps to dealing with the issue. If you think it doesn’t seem that hard, I’d like to introduce you to the U.S. food industrial complex; and also my 5-year-old and 8-year-old who want macaroni and cheese and want it now.

Of course, that doesn’t mean there aren’t good options for reducing the climate impact of your diet. To start, I have one word for you: beef. If you do nothing else, eating less beef will make a big difference — as you can see from the chart here, the associated greenhouse gas emissions for beef tend to far outweigh those for other food items. You might also take a hard look reducing your intake of lamb, shrimp (that’s the translation of prawns from British English), cheese, and other forms of meat and seafood. Going full-on vegan or vegetarian is certainly worth considering, but at the least you can be confident that ordering a chicken sandwich instead of that cheeseburger is a better choice for the climate.

My second word for you is composting. The nice thing about composting is that it reduces the climate impact of your diet no matter what you eat (subject to limits on what can be composted). Organic waste that is sent to landfills produces methane when it decomposes, which is a far more powerful greenhouse gas than carbon dioxide. Composting, on the other hand, converts food scraps into soil carbon that can be used as fertilizer, without producing methane. That makes composting far more climate-friendly than throwing your leftovers in the trash, even when compared to landfills with methane capture systems. Side benefit: as a composter myself thanks to my town’s drop-off program, I can tell you your trash will be far less smelly!

Of course, composting is an option that may be a lot more accessible for some of you than others, since local waste management programs vary widely across the U.S. — check with your local government on the availability of public options, or you may be able to sign up for a private program. (If you live in a bigger city, this map also offers a consolidated overview of what’s out there currently.) If you can’t find an affordable program near you, think about talking to the right policymakers who might be able to set something up. Even if you don’t see immediate results, you may be paving the way for future efforts just by asking the right people the right questions.

Flying

While food is too complicated for easy answers, flying is too simple.  At least until the aviation industry figures out renewable fuel or electric planes, flying is a high-emissions endeavor.  And when do you fly?  Usually when you’re traveling long distances. Emissions per mile x many miles = a big chunk of emissions. (Even though I’m a lawyer I can do some math.) It’s not shipping all those packages that’s the main problem, since a lot of them travel by ship, truck, or train; passenger air travel represents a significant majority of aviation emissions. So, except in certain limited scenarios, the best way to reduce or avoid greenhouse gas emissions from air travel is…to reduce or avoid air travel. Easier said than done, of course, especially in the U.S. where many of you will live thousands of miles from family, customers, and vacation destinations.  (Notably, estimates suggest that flights originating in the United States are the source of a full quarter of global aviation emissions.)

The main option you’ll come across for mitigating this part of your climate footprint is something called “carbon offsets.” What are those? You may remember learning about Renewable Energy Certificates in Step One, where a renewable project sells off the right to claim the greenhouse gas reductions resulting from the generation of carbon-free electricity. Carbon offsets are similar, except they represent the right to claim the greenhouse gas reductions resulting from any project that has gone through some evaluation to verify its impacts — whether building renewable energy resources, directly capturing greenhouse gases, increasing building efficiency, adopting regenerative agricultural practices, or a range of other types of efforts. If you’re buying a plane ticket and see the option to pay an extra charge offset the climate impact of your flight, this is what you’ll be paying for.

While in theory this should work — emit greenhouse gases here, but reduce them there — there have been serious questions raised about whether the current carbon offset system actually produces legitimate results, especially from “nature-based” forestry projects that are among the most common sources of carbon offsets today. Overall, this primarily voluntary market is still mostly in the Wild West stage. From your perspective, that means buying a carbon offset isn’t currently the category of “what you see is what you get,” and you’ll want to be careful to understand what you’re paying for. If you do want to check on what projects you might be supporting through the major carbon offset retailers out there today, you can find a detailed registry through UC-Berkeley or market survey data through the non-profit initiative Ecosystem Marketplace.

That said, keep an eye out. Carbon offset markets and (in some places) regulations are evolving every day. In an ideal world, they could support projects among underserved communities and populations that need the most help switching to clean energy and reducing pollution, promoting equity alongside efforts to address climate change. We’re not there yet, but for areas like aviation carbon offsets may be our best hope for now.