Carbon Dioxide: Too Many New Records

We humans are pushing carbon dioxide into the atmosphere five times faster than we were in the 1960s. We’ve reached not only a new record of 427 parts per million but also a new record in the amount of increase in one year.

Scripps Institute of Oceanography

The current concentration of CO2 in the atmosphere is twice what it was prior to industrialization in the 19th century, and higher than it’s been in several million years — when sea levels were 78 feet higher than today. 

Also: a quarter of the carbon dioxide we’ve emitted in the past 175 years has been absorbed by the oceans, which are becoming more and more acidic as a result. Bye-bye, coral reefs. 

The amount of CO2 the oceans can absorb has slowed since the start of industrialization — so more of our excess CO2 is going into the atmosphere.

Meanwhile, we’ve pushed atmospheric methane to a level approaching three times what it was before the Industrial Revolution, mostly because the amount of livestock we’re farming. Rice paddies, landfills, and fossil fuel extraction also contribute.

Methane heats the air a lot faster than carbon dioxide does. It degrades in about a decade into water and — yikes! carbon dioxide. 

CO2, unfortunately, is niiiiice and stable. It hangs around for hundreds of years. If we could somehow end all emissions by 2100, it would take thousands of years for CO2 to drop to its pre-industrial level.

Y’all, I’m nervous. Every day, I choose hope that we can manage as a human family to reduce consumption, transition to renewable fuels, and make peace. But despair over the world we are leaving the coming generations is never far from my mind. 

What if NJ Transit Actually Served New Jersey?

New Jersey Transit mostly exists to get people from the hinterlands to and from Newark and New York; you can also go to Trenton, Philadelphia, and Atlantic City.

The European Union, population density 109 per km2, supports a rail network that goes even to the tiniest towns, via high-speed rail and a gazillion local lines.

New Jersey, with 488 people per km2,  has more than four times the population density of Europe, but only the tiniest fraction of the rail network. It turns out I’m not the only person who imagines a more robust rail system.

Reddit: creolefish

Here’s the thing, though: this is still a commuter system with NYC/Newark and Philadelphia as the hubs. 

New Jersey is already among the states with the lowest number of cars per capita, at 674 cars per thousand residents. The European Union, despite all those trains, averages 567 cars per person — not so different from New Jersey. But we drive almost twice as far every year than they do — 14,263 miles per year, on average, compared to Europeans’ 12,000 km, or 7440 miles, per year.

(Montana, on the other hand, has almost two cars for every person in the state. Including children. How do they find the time to drive them all?) 

Connecting all of New Jersey without having to transfer in Newark or Secaucus would take only two more rail lines, each starting at the Hudson River in the north, and running west, south, and finally east to the Atlantic Ocean.

The inner ring would go from Stevens to Stockton, with stops at Montclair State, Seton Hall, Monmouth, Georgian Court, and the community colleges in Essex, Union, Middlesex, Monmouth, and Ocean counties. 

The outer ring would run from Fairleigh Dickinson to Atlantic City, by way of the community colleges in the north, east, and south of the state, with a stop at Cape May.

It would transform the state.

• The availability of public transit would increase access to college. Low-income students can study at community colleges around the state for free, but the effective tax is that they need cars to get to class. Driving cheaper, older cars means less reliable transport on top of more repair bills, plus car insurance and gas.
• Reducing by even a quarter the average amount New Jersey residents drive every year would cut tailpipe emissions by more than 3 million metric tons: New Jersey has 2.5 million cars whose owners drive them, on average, 12,263 miles every year, emitting, on average 5 metric tons of carbon dioxide each, or collectively 12.5 million metric tons of CO2.
• Lower-income residents rely on an outrageously slow bus network to get to work and run errands; replacing these bus lines with trains would speed their trips dramatically (and get yet more vehicles off the roads).
• If half the people who went to the shore on a summer weekend could easily ride the train, they’d get to spend more time swimming, flirting, and eating ice cream, and less time stuck in traffic and hunting for parking. With only half the traffic on the roads, the drivers would get there faster, too.
• If teenagers could take a quick train ride to meet up with friends in the next town, we could worry a whole lot less about them driving under the influence.
• Roads with fewer cars are safer for pedestrians and cyclists. And making biking safer would reduce driving even more: almost 40 percent of the time someone gets in the car, they drive three miles or less. A leisurely three-mile bike ride to go to work or run an errand takes fifteen minutes — barely enough to break a sweat. And spending 30 minutes a day on a bike instead of driving and parking makes people healthier and happier.

Less road rage. More time for exercise. Lower emissions. More leisure time. Can we afford NOT to upgrade the system?

Chocolate, Coffee, and Sustainability

Chocolate and coffee are harmful to humans and to the environment in several ways.

Industrial-scale farmers clear forests to plant the trees and shrubs that are the source of coffee and cacao beans. The resulting habitat loss contributes to species extinction, and the loss of trees means more carbon dioxide in the atmosphere. Roasting the beans, manufacturing chocolate bars, and shipping the end products also releases a lot of CO2.

There's a good run-down of the evils of chocolate here, and of coffee, here.

According to Our World in Data, carbon dioxide emissions per kilogram of chocolate and coffee are comparable to those of cheese and shrimp: not as bad as beef and lamb, but many times higher than the carbon footprints of lentils and soy beans.

Go here for a larger version of the chart.

So if you're paying attention to the ecological impacts of your diet, coffee and chocolate are up there, pound for pound. 

As you can see from the chart above, net emissions of tree nuts are about three-tenths of a kilogram of CO2 per kilo of nuts, because the trees themselves take up CO2 as they grow. (On the other hand, they need a lot of water, and farmers in drought-prone places like California probably shouldn't be growing them.) Apples net 0.4 kg of CO2 per kilo, peas 0.9, tomatoes 1.4, and cane sugar 3 kg of CO2 per kilogram consumed. 

But there's a big difference in the quantities consumed. On average, Americans consume nearly 10 pounds of coffee per year and more than 11 pounds of chocolate. 

That compares to a total of well over 200 pounds per person of meat: in 2020, we averaged almost 100 pounds of chicken, almost 60 pounds of beef, and just over 50 pounds of pork. On top of that, we ate around 16 pounds of fish.

If you're wondering, we ate, on average, 145 pounds of vegetables in 2020. And we consume, on average, just over 150 pounds of sugar every year. 

So the carbon footprint of our sugar turns out to be higher, in the aggregate, than the impact of our coffee and chocolate, which in turn is far lower than the total average carbon footprint of the meat we collectively eat.

In terms of individual choices, it's is environmentally sound to limit consumption of coffee and chocolate, and certainly to seek out shade-grown and fair trade varieties. 

But you'll have a bigger impact if you trade in your gas guzzler for an electric car, put solar panels on the roof of your house, fly as little as possible, and vote for lawmakers who will fund public transportation and renewable energy.

Circular Economies

To slow the release of carbon into the atmosphere, we can turn to renewable energy and biodegradable packaging, but to stop it, we need to return to a circular economy, with localized nodes all over the world.

Our current global and local economies depend on "natural resources" and "human resources" with the assumption that these are limitless, that the earth possesses or will continue to generate enough raw materials for the endless production and transport of new goods. In fact, many of our global industries depend not just on stable markets, but continuously growing ones, for financial stability. We have now reached the point where this will no longer allow for environmental sustainability.

In order to reach a point of truly circular economy, we need to reuse, recycle, compost, or burn (as fuel) everything we produce. And we're doing a terrible job at that.

While glass and metals can readily be recycled and similar products created, with less energy output than refining new materials, recycling plastic is much more difficult. Plastic, once produced, can't be melted down and re-used in the same form.

Water bottles (#1 plastic), for instance, can be made into fleece sweaters, but not into new plastic water bottles. There's a problem, though: every time you launder that fleece, you release microplastics into your town sewer system, and they end up in the ocean where they're killing wildlife.

Here's a table from Oxford University that summarizes how plastics are generally recycled by communities:

Go here for the full-size image

It turns out, though, that the situation isn't quite as dire, in theory: Plastics labeled  #2, #3, #4, and #5 can be turned into plastic wood. The town of Long Branch started a program last year to recycle plastic bags and wrappers (#4). They promised a park bench after 500 pounds of packaging was collected, and this January, the first bench was installed near Lake Takanassee.

Meanwhile, the town of Middletown, NJ recently opened a styrofoam recycling center, open to residents of the entire county. It only collects styrofoam used in packaging and shipping, not food-grade products, so you still need to get a reusable mug for your Dunkin Donuts coffee, and avoid take-out that's packaged in styrofoam.

There's a breakdown, however, been theory and practice. Between 1950 and 2015, the amount of plastic products produced annually rose almost 200-fold, from 2 million metric tons per year to 381 million metric tons, and only 9 percent of that was recycled.

We need to do better, and when it comes to plastics we need to address this in several different ways.

Governments need to enact carbon taxes to encourage corporate and individual consumers to use less carbon, by making it more expensive.

Producers of plastic products need to do a better job of making containers out of more easily recyclable products when possible, researching and developing biodegradable containers, and avoiding excess packaging.

Consumers need to send a message through individual purchases and buying habits that we don't want plastic. We need to:

• stop buying bottled water and other products packaged in single-use plastics
• refuse excess packaging, for instance when we buy loose produce
• advocate with local and state governments to enact plastic bag bans, and meanwhile make the choice to use reusable bags for our shopping
• boycott Dunkin Donuts and other corporations that still use styrofoam instead of paper hot drink cups, and tell them why

... and more. Those are starting points, not end points. We need to move to an economy where everything we produce can be repurposed in some way. It's going to take imagination and persistence. If we don't do it voluntarily, the effects of climate crisis will force the issue.

Identifying and Removing Aggressive Invasive Species

This is written for students in Humans and the Environment, a first-year seminar at Monmouth University in central New Jersey, but may be helpful for others working to shift their lawns toward species that support local and migrating pollinators and birds.

Students in class undertake a two-day "ecological restoration project." Part one is removal of invasive species and part two is planting native flowers and shrubs. On day one, we will focus on four different invasive species that have colonized the park.

Japanese Knotweed (native to Japan)

Note the large leaves that alternate along the stem, red bamboo-like stems, and small white flowers. Japanese knotweed flowers in late summer to early fall. In spring and early summer, the leaves are red.

Porcelain berry (native to Siberia)

Porcelain berry has five-sided leaves of various forms, long, branching vines, and tough stems. Whitish berries appear in midsummer and ripen to purple and blue. Porcelain berry has long branching taproots that are quite difficult to pull up, especially once established.

Multiflora Rose (native to China, Japan, and Korea)

This is a thin-stemmed bramble with small but tough thorns requiring leather gloves to remove. It has small flowers in mid-summer and small fruits later in the season.

Oriental Bittersweet (native to China)

Oriental bittersweet has medium sized, medium green leaves with a pronounced point.

Long, tough vines climb the trunks and branches of trees, blocking sun and choking them out.

Tools and Information

Tools include gloves, pitchforks, shovels, and clippers. For more information about these and other aggressive invasive species, see the New Jersey Department of Environmental Protection Fact Sheet.

All photos courtesy of Catherine N. Duckett, Associate Dean, School of Science, Monmouth University, whose research specialization is evolutionary entomology.

Flying as an Environmentalist

The amount I’m flying this year is getting me down, because it’s hands-down the most carbon-intensive thing I do, and it negates all the carbon reductions I achieve by eating vegan, biking to work, and trying to reject consumer habits.

I’m flying this year to four conferences to give papers on ecocriticism — the study of how literature and other cultural artifacts like art, movies, and historical documents describe or depict how humans interact with the environment. My scholarly work deals with how the literature of early medieval England represents humans and the environments they occupy and imagine — from wilderness and forests through farms and their homes.

My engagement with medieval ecocriticisms is explicitly activist. I believe that thinking about the ways that humans of the past engaged with their environments can help us understand our present. I also believe that we’re in a time of climate crisis, and ecocritical humanities has to recognize that, and our scholarly endeavors have to advance understanding of the need to act, NOW. So that means I also need to act, myself — and all the flying is a real problem.

The last time I flew, I googled “carbon offsets” for flights, and rapidly went down a rabbit hole of conflicting information. One article claimed individuals don’t need to buy carbon offsets, because airlines are taking care of it. For example, they claimed Delta was providing carbon offsets for all travelers through certain airports, including the one I flew through. Turned out they were only doing that for flights taken on Earth Day.

I decided to create my own carbon sink by planting a tree for every flight I take this year. Here’s number one:

It’s a tiny, baby swamp white oak, maybe a foot tall. I planted it in a gully by Long Branch’s elementary school, with the help of a colleague and friend who has a contact there. In the photo, I’m building a cage made out of hardware cloth that will help protect the little tree from predators, mostly deer, and from accidentally being mowed. I’ll need to check on it periodically, and if we have a dry spell in the next four years I’ll have to water it.

My flights to Detroit, San Francisco, Albuquerque, and Charlottesville will add up to carbon emissions of about 3.4 tons.

A tree can sequester one ton of carbon in 40 years.

I plan to plant four trees this summer to offset the four flights I’m taking. And the labor of doing that is making me think harder about conference planning for next year, because I plan to continue planting trees to offset my own flights. But we’re in climate crisis now — we don’t have 40 years for the trees to grow.

What Will You Do? A Birthday Request

I’m turning 55 this month. Facebook has been encouraging me to set up a donation link and ask all my friends to contribute to my favorite cause. Instead, I’m asking my friends to do something about the environment.

Climate change has become a huge problem, and we are all going to be affected in our lifetimes. You don’t need me to tell you all the ways we’re doomed.

I’m not going to tell you what to do — we need action in so many different spheres and at so many different levels. If you’re going to keep up a commitment, it has to be to something that you feel is meaningful and that you are comfortable doing. 

We need government action, we need corporate action, and we need individual action. We need carbon taxes, we need businesses to adopt environmentally responsible processes, we need better public transit, we need better pedestrian and bike routes, and we need to stop consuming and wasting so much stuff at the individual level.

Maybe you’d be comfortable making a weekly phone call to an elected official — local, state, or federal — urging them to take positive action on some issue concerning the environment. Maybe you hold stocks, and you can try to persuade the corporations you invest in to take more environmentally responsible actions. Or you are vested in a retirement account and you can persuade its managers to disinvest from fossil fuels.

Maybe you want to try giving up fast fashion, spending more money on fewer items of clothing that will last longer. 

Maybe you want to try eating lower on the food chain, or cutting back on beef and dairy, which are worse for the environment than vegetable sources of protein but also worse than chicken and eggs.

Maybe you think it would be an interesting challenge to give up single-use plastics, whether water bottles, take-out containers, or soap and shampoo bottles. Maybe you can persuade your favorite take-out place to switch to paper containers. Maybe you’ll get a reusable coffee cup and get your coffee shop to put your morning brew in it instead of into paper or styrofoam.

Maybe you want to turn down the heat and put on a sweater, or in the summer turn up the heat and put on a fan. Maybe you can buy your electricity from a company that uses renewable sources, or even put solar panels on your roof.

Maybe you’re willing to give up your lawn, and the chemical fertilizers and pest control chemicals you’re using to maintain it, and instead create a yard full of native flowers and shrubs that will attract bees and butterflies and birds, and native trees that will do those things plus sequester carbon and provide summer-time shade that will reduce your need for air conditioning.

Maybe you believe environmental justice should be our biggest priority, and you want to volunteer for a few hours a month with an organization that helps both people and the environment.

Maybe you’re contemplating a move, and you want to choose a new home based in part on environmental criteria: well insulated? In a multi-unit building, so it can share heating and cooling via walls adjacent to other units? Close to public transit so you can take a bus or train to work or to school? Close enough to work so that you can walk or ride a bike?

My own commitments for the year are to recommit to a number of environmentally responsible habits, including use of public transit, avoiding take-out, and keeping my shopping for anything other than necessities to a bare minimum, and to get back to blogging about environmental issues. My goal will be to post weekly. Once a month, I’ll tell you what I am doing myself to help the environment. In other posts, I’ll provide more information about the things I’ve mentioned above, along with links to sources, as well as other ideas about things we can do to make the world a better place, big as well as small.

Do I have 55 friends who are with me? Please post in the comments section, or if you’d rather be anonymous, message me. Thank you.

Weather and the Street Grid

The National Weather Service has issued another heat advisory for several upcoming days in New York City. Right now, they are reporting that it’s 87 degrees, but feels like 93.

Lately I’ve been noticing quite regularly that my car and the bank that displays the temperature nearby are routinely recording temperatures higher than those being reported. It appears the weather services are using Central Park as their baseline.

But most of Manhattan is not park, and most of the parks are not Central Park, but much smaller public spaces, many of them with significant percentages devoted to paths, basketball courts, and other things that soak up heat. Next City estimates 15 percent of the borough is parkland, and 36 percent streets, which presumably includes sidewalks. Several years ago, Newsweek wrote about a study stuggesting 20 percent of Manhattan is yard space — but much of that is also paved. That leaves about 30 percent of the city’s surface covered by buildings.

In other words, a large majority of Manhattan is paved or covered in buildings.

Which means in a large majority of the city, the temperature is going to be higher than it is in Central Park. Earlier today, the weather stations were reporting a temperature of 91 with a heat index of 100. But at Apple Bank in my neighborhood, the sign said it was 100 degrees. What’s the heat index in that case?

And what are the implications and consequences of consistent underreporting of daytime and probably also nighttime temperatures in Manhattan and other heavily urbanized areas?

It turns out that large portions of Brooklyn and much of the Bronx, areas with waste transfer stations and industry that also house populations that are mostly people of color, are even more vulnerable to high heat than most of Manhattan.

I have no idea if the temperature reporting discrepancies are enough, given the relatively small land area of New York and other cities in comparison to surrounding areas, to affect our understanding of the severity of climate change.

But the effects on individuals would be significant. If the weather services is saying the heat index is 101, based on conditions in Central Park, but its actually several degrees higher in much of the city, then that alone is putting people in danger. Given that hundreds of people die of heat-related problems in New York City every year, and that people of color are disproportionatly effected, I think it’s time the weather services reported temperatures in the neighborhoods people actually live in, not idealized conditions in Central Park.

One Cheeseburger At A Time

Blitz's meat calculator will tell you how many pigs and chickens and cows you eat every year based on weekly meat consumption, and will tell you how many animals you can "save" if you switch some of your meals to vegetarian.

According to the calculator, if you're an average American you'll eat two pigs, two-thirds of a cow, and 289 chickens in the next ten years. If you reduce your meat consumption by even ten percent, that adds up to half a pig, a calf, and 29 chickens.

For the environment, what matters more than the lives of the animals is the resources used to produce them, including petroleum, water, and antibiotics.

The difference between a vegetarian diet and a meat-eating one, over ten years, is 18,000 pounds of carbon dioxide and 238,810 gallons of water. Think about California droughts and wildfires in that context.

Plus, one cow releases somewhere between 70 and 120 kg of methane a year, and methane is 25 times as powerful in causing climate change than CO2. Reducing your impact doesn't have to mean going vegan; swapping out one cheeseburger a week for pasta primavera or even a chicken sandwich will make a difference.