Euan Murray grew up on a sheep farm in southern Scotland; now he is in charge of “carbon footprinting” for corporate clients of the Carbon Trust. “If I ask my old man, ‘What’s the carbon footprint of a sheep?’ he looks at me as though I’m mad,” he explains. “But he can tell me the stocking density, what he feeds the sheep, and he can answer those questions as part of running his business.”
Quite so. Carbon footprinting, the study of how much carbon dioxide is released in the process of producing, consuming and disposing of a product, is all about the specifics. This is a refreshing change from the politics of climate change, which is all about the generics. We hear promises from our leaders of big change in the future, without any credible plans right now.
I first approached Murray to ask him about the climate change impact of a cappuccino. Loyal readers may recall that a year and half ago, I wrote about the question, pointing out that meeting any of these grand targets in a sensible way would require billions upon billions of small decisions. The cappuccino’s climate change impact depends on whether the café is double-glazed, the decisions the staff and I take to get there, the diet of the methane-producing cow that produced the milk and the source of power for the espresso machine. Last week I pointed out that there are around 10 billion products in a modern economy; that means that the problem of reducing carbon dioxide emissions is “simply” the problem of reducing carbon dioxide emissions from a cappuccino, 10 billion times over.
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