We’ve heard of the term “zero carbon footprint” in the past few years to bring awareness to the sustainability movement. But even if we all go zero carbon right now, what happens to the years when we didn’t do much about the environment? Don’t we need to do even more than zero carbon and go into the negative territory to bring the environment back to its sustainable state?
I suppose I am sort of looking at this like the national debt. We have a debt, and at the same time we try to balance our annual budget. Even if we don’t have any more deficits, we still have a debt. We need to have a surplus every year to get us back in the black (even though I am told we intentionally will never pay back our debt, for certain economic reasons).
I know that right now, we can’t even get to absolutely zero carbon, so getting negative carbon is even harder. And I’m pretty sure that involves more than planting trees for every whatever product we buy.
Flush.
This entry was posted on Saturday, June 6th, 2009 at 11:11 and is filed under General. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.
Yep. Also have been thinking about the notion of data as a driver. In essence still we are in the days where so little content is known about our impacts on the world except for that carbon=bad. This is not compelling enough an argument for many and should be more concrete. It’s hard to say if we are in ‘debt’ as you put it or if instead we are lacking in basic mechanisms for quantifying where we are. I enjoy your linkage between money (as a calculable medium) and our new concerns regarding carbon. I’m hoping for some basic tabulations to be able to be calculated -for example when will we be able to read out our waste matrix? when we know that we can more easily figure out how to link our ‘wastes’ into inputs for other production. It will also be easier to strategize best ways to reduce waste. In essence, we’re doing everything on the back-end what should be integrated thruogh the process.
Another way to think about it is in terms of concentration of CO2 in the atmosphere. 350 parts per million seems to be the number scientists are converging on as the limit to maintain normal life on earth.
This might be a bit simpler to think about than the National Debt analogy – simply because it’s so hard to track all the sources and all the sinks for CO2 (ie there’s a lot of things that absorb CO2 – most plants, for example). This implies that if we maintain the health of our natural ecosystems, we may not have to get to “carbon neutral”, because the natural world provides some carbon sinks. As long as we maintain the balance and stay under 350 ppm, supposedly we’ll be OK.
Interesting. How (not) close are we to 350ppm?