As an example, consider coffee. It has become fashionable for snobs (incidentally, whenever anyone says they are an "X" snob, e.g., a coffee snob, I ALWAYS delete the "X") to use coffee pods: there has been a little information about the environmental damage from disposal of the pods, but there has been no discussion about the EMBEDDED GREENHOUSE GASES THAT WENT INTO MANUFACTURING THE MACHINERY AND THE PODS - and that, along with the warping of people's psyches / souls that goes with adopting the trappings of snobbery, is where the greatest damage is.
This is another reason that large houses and large cars are so bad, no matter how energy efficient they may be in usage: they use more energy and resources, and thus create more greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions, than smaller houses and cars. Now, in the bad old days, things were perhaps too small - for instance, when families typically had four or more kids (in the 1930s), the kids may have had to share rooms or even beds, and I don't think the situation was for the psychological good of all people, but people FITTED.
Nowadays, we THINK we need more space - partly because we have more useless or unnecessary stuff, and partly to "keep up with the Jones". The truth is, we don't, in most cases. Also, many large cars come with an arrogance that puts other people's lives at risk: we may well be better off if we all felt more vulnerable in smaller cars and thus drove more safely. (Better car design for all sizes would help, and there are taller people who need more space.)
We also don't need the flash (fancy) finishes, features and the like.
There are some valid extra needs - for instance, computers.
On that, there are limitations in some of the stuff that is now available - for instance, e-book readers. I would like to have one of those, but they have a SERIOUS AND SUBSTANTIAL FLAW: the books you have on your e-book reader can be deleted by the supplier, if they consider you have done something wrong (which is reasonable, if you have in fact done something wrong), but if you are found NOT to have done something wrong, not only do they not replace the collection, they don't have to. Hence, until that flaw is properly remedied, I will continue to limit myself to PDFs and hard copies.
This undue focus on GHGs is probably most apparent when considering things like passive solar design. Passive solar design has a lot of flaws - e.g., it fails to keep low sun out of the house in the morning and afternoon of hot days, it doesn't provide heating in the morning on winter days when people have to get up and get ready for school, in the suburbs the whole approach can be nullified by a neighbour building a "McMansion" or having evergreen shade trees, etc. It has some decided advantages as well, but we need active solar and geostabilisation, as well as decent heat mass and insulation - which is something I hope to post about in the not too distant future. The point about passive solar's flaws, is that for the sake of liveability, many people have air conditioning or heating for the events that passive solar doesn't cope with. And they think that such is fine, that they've somehow "earned" it by saving power the rest of the time - which, if they know even a little bit about utilities, is stupid beyond all measure.
The basis for which utility systems are designed and built (and thus the amount of GHGs they generate during construction - i.e., the quantity of embedded GHGs) is based upon PEAK demand: the size of water pipes is set by summer demands, which are higher than in winter, for instance. Power generating stations and distribution networks are sized to cater for the peak demand - often, in Australia, the hottest days. As another example, there are some progressive Environment Protection Authorities which set environmental limits on discharges not by concentration (mg/L - aka ppm) but by total mass (aka "weight"), which shows how significant discharges under peak flow conditions are.
All of this means that things like passive solar may reduce the operational GHGs (and operating costs), but the embedded GHGs (and construction costs) are untouched by such approaches - they are, however, helped by things which do address peak demand, such as geostabilisation to cool houses, distributed water tanks on potable water networks (which are a standard feature, by the way), and household solar power generation - which generates more power when it is needed.
So, if you are living in a developed/industrialised/consumeristic society, and you wish to do something for the environmental welfare of the plant, then I suggest:
- simplify your life; and
- encourage others to do likewise - including clearing any nonBPM units stopping them doing so and strengthening BPM units.
