What do one person’s CO2 emissions look like?

If you can’t intuit the scale of the climate problem, you can’t think straight about solutions

The average person’s share…

Last year, we added 37.5 gigatons of CO₂ to the atmosphere. If you’re a normal person, that number means exactly nothing to you.

Nobody knows what a gigaton is. It sounds like a lot. It is a lot.

But how much is it, really?

The word “gigaton” evokes no mental image for me. It’s just an abstraction; it gives me nothing to latch on to for scale.

Which is normal. Everyone struggles with large numbers. We evolved on the edge of an African savannah, with no need at all for large numbers. A dozen or two we can intuit, anything north of that gives us the heebie-jeebies. Start talking about millions of this or billions of that, and we’re lost. And if the units are unfamiliar, well, then we’re really out to sea.

This is a big part of the reason why our climate conversation is so messed up. Climate talk happens almost exclusively in terms of huge numbers, unfamiliar units, or both. Gigatons. Parts per million. Watts per square meter, for God’s sake. Gobbledygook.

Obsessed as I am with this stuff, the other day I found myself googling how many zeros a gigaton has (it’s nine, btw = a billion tons…or 12, if you’re thinking in kilos.)

That’s a start: last year we emitted 37.5 billion tons of CO₂ last year.

How do you attach a mental image to a number that big?

There are are just under 8 billion of us on this forsaken planet. So CO₂ emissions work out to about 4.7 tons for every man, woman and child on earth.

But what do 4.7 tons look like?

Well, an average bowling ball weighs 7.25 kg., so last year each of us emitted roughly as much as 648 bowling balls weigh. To fit that many bowling balls into a cube-shaped crate, it would have to be 1.67 m (or 5’6”) on each side.

Not helping? OK, the average American man weighs 80 kg., so we each emitted about 59 Americans last year.

Still hazy? Well, you know those giant SUVs rich people drive, like the Lincoln Navigator or Cadillac Escalade? They’re massive. Fully loaded, they can weigh up to 3.4 tons. So we’re each emitting something like the weight of 1.4 monster SUV’s worth of CO₂ each year.

That’s still not the clearest image for me, so I kept looking. Then I stumbled on one of those fun facts:

The average adult Asian bull elephant weighs 4.7 tons!

Bingo!

That’s something I can picture.

Globally, we emit one Asian elephant’s worth of CO₂ per year!

Of course, that’s a global average. It hides plenty of variability.

The average American emits about three Asian elephants worth of CO₂ per year. Chinese people, about 2.3 elephants’ worth. Germans about 2, French people just 1.4.

Ecuador, Indonesia, Panama, Portugal, Malta, Namibia, and Vietnam, are all near the global average — they each emit roughly one elephant’s worth of CO₂ per person per year.

The poorest countries emit much less: the Democratic Republic of Congo emits about a tenth of elephant’s worth of CO₂ per person per year, Afghanistan emits a fifth, as does Uganda and Madagascar.

Some energy poor countries emit so little CO₂, elephants aren’t even useful anymore: Burundi emits just 81 bowling balls’ weight worth of CO₂ per person per year, vs. almost 2,000 balls’ worth for the U.S.

But, globally, the average works out to one Asian elephant’s worth per person per year. Don’t you feel a little less lost just knowing that?

Getting some sense of the scale of the problem is a big step forward. But it doesn’t really address the real issue: how much is it reasonable to expect to pay to avoid emitting an Asian elephant’s weight worth of CO₂?

What is the average human willing to pay to suck an Asian elephant’s weight worth of CO₂ out of the atmosphere?

This is the heart of the matter, the hard nub of our climate innumeracy problem.

A shocking amount of climate advocacy goes wildly off track simply because climate advocates won’t ask this question forthrightly. Lost in a sea of meaningless numbers, they advocate solutions that turn out to be insanely unaffordable. That’s climate innumeracy in action.

Without a sense of scale, talk of decarbonization is strictly meaningless.

Depending on who you’re talking to, and in what context, the cost of avoiding an Asian elephant’s weight worth of CO₂ can be almost anything.

Direct Air Capture projects are notoriously cagey about their all-in costs, but currently it would cost something like $3,000-$4,700 to directly capture an Asian elephant’s worth of CO₂ from the air (meaning reaching Net Zero). Scaled up globally, that means using this technology, it would cost something in the range of 22% to 37% of global GDP to reach net zero: an utterly insane number, far, far beyond what is politically achievable.

Under Biden’s Inflation Reduction Act, the cost of preventing an Asian elephant’s weight worth of CO₂ from being emitted has been estimated at anywhere from $235 to $870. Carbon sequestration projects like Bio-Char come in at a similar cost range.

Is that affordable? No. Not even close.

At global scale, that would mean reaching net zero would cost between 2% and 7% of world income. That’s another number that probably doesn’t bring up a concrete mental image for you.

Let’s contextualize.

The world spends 2.4% of its income on defense, and 4.9% on education. Health care costs 10.5% of global income. These are absolutely massive numbers. Which makes sense: all three are absolutely huge sectors of modern economies, sectors that everyone relies on and that millions are directly employed in, sectors with massive built-in political constituencies. Sectors, in other words, that are far better able to mobilize resources than the fight against climate change will ever be.

There’s no reason to believe voters even in the richest countries will reliably vote for politicians who commit such sums to decarbonization. And, indeed, governments routinely face voter revolts over climate commitments much smaller than that.

If it’s that expensive, decarbonization cannot scale up. We can try it, but we will fail — we are failing — because it is unaffordable.

I don’t mean it’s unaffordable because oil company CEOs are greedy.

I don’t mean it’s unaffordable because politicians are short-sighted.

I mean it’s unaffordable because regular people can’t afford the tax and/or energy bills these kinds of approaches imply.

If we had a more numerate conversation about climate, we’d realize the need to bring our climate commitments in line with real people’s real willingness to pay.

That means we need solutions two-to-three orders of magnitude cheaper than what’s on offer today in the mainstream climate space.

We need to meet people where they are. And where they are is that climate change is a worry, but a highly abstract worry. It’s a concern more about what your grandchildren’s lives will be like than your own. Globally, household finances are hard pressed pretty much everywhere. Tell people you’re going to take a sizable chunk out of their disposable income to prevent a far-off disaster and they’ll not unreasonably tell you to take a hike.

My sense is that climate solutions are realistic at $5-20 per Asian elephant’s worth of CO₂ — that’s $1 to $4 per ton. Whether we’re talking about carbon abatement, sequestration, or about solutions that bring down global temperatures directly via albedo, we can surely finance solutions that cost $5-20 per person per year.

By an amazing stroke of luck we have several technologies that could undo the harms we’ve done to the atmosphere comfortably within this budget. Marine cloud brightening, stratospheric brightening and ocean fertilization all have the potential to meet our climate needs for price tags we can afford.

A generation of environmental activism has left us with reasonable levels of climate literacy, but abysmal standards of climate numeracy.

And innumeracy mangles our climate debates. Without a sense of scale, people advocate “solutions” that are no solutions at all, because they can’t be financed.

The reality is that we’ve got to get this done on $150 billion a year, no more. That’s $20 per person per year. Peanuts, compared to the huge sums experts keep telling us it would take through traditional means. But enough, if we have the courage to think outside the box.