Your personal choices in transportation and food are important for lowering carbon emissions

Highlights

● Express energy use and carbon emissions in understandable numbers.

● Normalize energy use to daily food energy using “D”.

● Ratio carbon emissions to those from daily food using “C”.

● Based on the entire country China emitted 22.5 C and the US emitted 43.9 C (2022).

● Personal choices such as the car you drive, food you eat, and home heating lower C.

Abstract

There is a global need to reduce greenhouse gas emissions to limit the extent of climate change. A better understanding of how our own activities and lifestyle influence our energy use and carbon emissions can help us enable changes in activities that can lead to reductions in carbon emissions. Here we discuss an approach based on examining carbon emissions from the perspective of the unit C, where 1 C is the CO₂ from food a person would on average eat every day. This approach shows that total CO₂ emissions in China, normalized by the population, is 22.5 C while carbon emissions for a person in the US is 43.9 C. A better appreciation of our own energy use can be obtained by calculating carbon emissions from our own activities in units of C, for example for driving a car gasoline or electric vehicle a certain number of kilometers, using electricity for our homes, and eating different foods. With this information, we can see how our carbon emissions compare to national averages in different countries and make decisions that could lower our personal CO₂ emissions.

Graphical abstract

Keywords

Carbon dioxide / Climate change / Daily energy / Greenhouse gas

Dr. Bruce E. Logan is Director of the Institute of Energy and the Environment, an Evan Pugh University Professor in Engineering, and the Stan and Flora Kappe Professor of Environmental Engineering in the Department of Civil and Environmental Engineering at Penn State University. His current research efforts are in bioelectrochemical systems, renewable energy production, the development of an energy sustainable water infrastructure, and education on energy, carbon emissions, and climate. Dr. Logan has mentored over 140 graduate students and postdoctoral researchers and hosted over 40 international visitors to his laboratory. He is the author or co-author of several books and over 550 refereed publications (>115000 citations, H-index=164; Google scholar). Logan is a member of the US National Academy of Engineering (NAE), an international member of the Chinese Academy of Engineering (CAE), and a fellow of the American Association for the Advancement of Science (AAAS), the International Water Association (IWA), the Water Environment Federation (WEF), and the Association of Environmental Engineering & Science Professors (AEESP). Logan is a guest professor at several universities including Tsinghua University, Harbin Institute of Technology (HIT), and Dalian University of Technology, with ties to several other universities in Saudi Arabia, the UK, and Belgium. He received his Ph.D. in 1986 from the University of California, Berkeley, was on the faculty of the University of Arizona for 11 years, and joined Penn State in 1997

References

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Open Access

This article is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License, which permits use, sharing, adaptation, distribution and reproduction in any medium or format, as long as you give appropriate credit to the original author(s) and the source, provide a link to the Creative Commons licence, and indicate if changes were made. The images or other third party material in this article are included in the article’s Creative Commons licence, unless indicated otherwise in a credit line to the material. If material is not included in the article’s Creative Commons licence and your intended use is not permitted by statutory regulation or exceeds the permitted use, you will need to obtain permission directly from the copyright holder. To view a copy of this licence, visit http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/.

Conflict of Interests

Bruce Logan is an advisory board member of Frontiers of Environmental Science & Engineering, Wulin Yang is a youth editoral board member of Frontiers of Environmental Science & Engineering. The authors declare that the research was conducted in the absence of any commercial or financial relationships that could be construed as a potential conflict of interest.

RIGHTS & PERMISSIONS

2024 The Author(s) 2024. This article is published with open access at link.springer.com and journal.hep.com.cn