This example illustrates the general problem with tracking carbon footprint - it has be tracked end-to-end across companies, borders, technological processes, while, at every stage, each agent has a personal incentive to cheat and report fake numbers. Just one such participant can invalidate entire computation. It seems hopeless, really.

YES!
I think of carbon footprints as about as useful as the body mass index. They are both suspect measures that can be wildly inaccurate but have the unfortunate effect of presenting themselves as objective facts. However, directionally they are useful. At the very least they can indicate where further investigation is needed.

Your natural gas example is a great one. I have often found myself like your Polish professor being whispered some horrifying new reality while on a stroll. As mentioned earlier, this happened recently with a possible 25% reduction in the estimated impact of my current project. Part of my ongoing headache of my work is how to make a solution small enough and disentangled from negative externalities to then confidently mobilize funds, efforts and consensus around. The frequency in which this blows up in my face is a big part of why I'm on this forum. The types of solutions I can get paid to work on might always be critically undermined by the thinking that caused all the problems in the first place. Thus, I feel a real need to consider the ERE2 question and make my poor liberal arts brain study this systems thinking stuff.

IMO, if politicians truly had the goal of reducing emissions in mind, they'd just build out nuclear energy, throw in renewables where it makes sense, and, most importantly, ban fossil fuels altogether (as in - you go to jail if we catch you burning fossil fuels).

I think politicians, and particularly those who need to get elected on a regular basis, lead from behind. The difference in energy policy between China and the U.S. is partly a consequence of how long-term politicians are allowed to plan for. Regardless, it is vanishingly few of them globally who would actually counsel the disruption implicit in moving to electricity as you describe. An actual ban on fossil fuels would have huge repercussions. Fossil fuels are the form of energy that makes much of our current transportation networks, agriculture, and industrial processes possible or at least possible at the price we are accustomed to paying. Thousands of chemical compounds that have built the modern world are derived from oil. Just losing natural gas to use for the Haber-Bosch process would require a whole-scale revolution to farming and nitrogen management. I mean, I think that's where we will need to get, but I think we will need to get scared into this compliance.

I believe there is important work to be done to make the pathways to this future more acceptable and to prepare the systems that can be employed. @AH talks about building the lifeboat flotilla while on the Titanic. I believe that a lot of the Titanic can be torn up and turned into lifeboats provided there are plans and skilled people to direct the work. That's my guess for some of the highest value contributions in the next 25-50 years.

However, I shouldn't skip ahead in the textbook! ERE1 conveniently finds the best proxy for your personal carbon emissions ($$$ spent) and radically reduces it while building the competencies and providing the free time to be proactive about future solutions. I don't think mainstreaming ERE1 is feasible now, but it might be possible to get a visible minority doing it in a way that makes people grumble: "I guess I could do that, if I really had to." Neuroplasticity for our species, or something like that.

Statistics: Posted by ThoreauGoing — Mon Mar 09, 2026 10:28 pm

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