Monday, July 12, 2021

Carbon Neutral

 Nowadays being Carbon neutral is kind of in fashion. Every organization who wants to "look good" in the books of their customers or stakeholder simply announces they plan to be carbon neutral in next 10-15 years. But there is a catch here? They have no plans around how they would do it, if not all, then at least most of them do not have a clue what they are talking about.

At the same time, we must ask what is the definition of being Carbon Neutral. Right now, those companies who say they are carbon neutral based on what they produce, or in other words based on their final product/outcome. But essentially what they do is that they push that carbon to someone else. Its more of carbon pushing than being carbon neutral. Pushing the carbon to someone else is not really being Carbon Neutral is it?

A simple principle we must remember, as long as we continue to defy nature and continue to live outside that nature, nothing is and nothing will be carbon neutral. Sounds pessimistic, but allow me to explain with an example. Lets take electric cars as an example. Tesla manufactures some of the most sleek and electric cars. It is a technological marvel. I admire Elon Musk and I admire Tesla. Now since these Tesla cars are electric cars, one might say that these cars lower the emission. Do they? Lets explore what all emissions we are not considering when looking at these cars.

Lets start with the batteries. The soul of electric cars. Batteries are made of chemicals, and chemicals do not simply appear on their own, they need to be manufactured. Did we take into account what the emissions are for those chemicals? How about all the charging these cars require. Isn't it true that most of the electricity in this world is still made by burning some kind of fuel? In that case, isn't that charging which we now need to do, instead of directly burning fuels in a traditional car, leads to emissions? Just because electric cars do not have an exhaust pipe doesn't mean these cars do not add to carbon emissions.

In my opinion we should derive some kind of formula to calculate the "net carbon emission" for products. For example, for electric cars - 

Net carbon emission of an electric car = Sum of all carbon emissions associated with manufacturing of all parts + Average number of charges per year x Useful life of the car x Carbon emissions per charge + Carbon emissions required for disposal of car after its useful life + Carbon emissions associated with the sale of that car.

Tedious?! Of course its going to be a tedious process, saving our environment is no easy thing. once the net emission of the electric car is zero, only then we should call it carbon neutral.

I might sound cynical, but in my head, I have a simple rule. As long as we draw resources on a large scale with ambition to grow year after year with no end in sight, there is simply no way for any business to be carbon neutral.

Everyday, when we wake up, we fight the nature, we strive to stay away from nature. We have ACs because its hot, central heating because its cold, concrete buildings because we are scared of the outside, we need a bed to sleep on, because its nice to feel soft when we go to sleep, we need plates and forks and spoon to eat because that ways we look civilized!, we need 24 hour hot water because we never know when we might need it, we need bathing salts because it smells nice, we need insect repellants because they annoy us, we need chemicals to wash our hair and body because that makes us feel clean. I could go on for days, the point is, every morning when we wake up, we do everything possible to stay away from nature. We only like nature when we look outside the window or those walks where we are happy to see a tree and a lake, otherwise we humans are pretty happy to stay in our man made cocoons. 

As long as we continue to live outside nature, as long as we draw resources from the nature at an industrial scale, with no time for nature to replenish the resources, how on earth can we be carbon neutral.

Next time, when you sit in an airconditioned room, ask yourself, are you not emitting carbon, without even moving a single bone?

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