In this part, I will define some ideas that will be used throughout the series: first, what I mean by the built environment and other key terms; and then flows and stocks (section 2.1); material footprint and carbon footprint (section 2.2); embodied emissions and operational emissions (section 2.3); Life Cycle Analysis (section 2.4); and varieties of footprint (section 2.5). In a final section 2.6, I comment on the politics inherent in the idea of footprints and the way they are calculated.
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| Graphic: Fraunhofer IBP/Jan Paul Lindner. From the Circular Flooring web site |
Researchers who study greenhouse gas emissions and other environmental impacts, conventionally understand the built environment to include all elements of human-made infrastructure and buildings: large, durable products that sit in one place and (usually, ideally) provide a long lifetime of use, from homes to office buildings, roads to reservoirs.
In order for the built environment to function well, it needs to be appropriate to its environmental context; durable, resilient to changes in the environment, and actively maintained.
The category of the built environment tends to exclude agricultural land-use, except for the buildings and infrastructure that make farming possible.
Also, the built environment is conventionally distinguished both from transport and from energy transmission.[1]
Nevertheless, the kinds of transport and energy infrastructures that get commissioned and built – roads, railways, wind farms, pipelines – bear very strongly not only on the end-use footprints of the transport and energy sectors, but also on the operational use of buildings and of non-energy and -transport infrastructure.
Throughout this series I will use the term “use-value” to describe the physical aspect of something – the side of it that has a some physical or otherwise “sensuous” use. The use-value of something is distinct from its monetary value (“exchange-value”) – and use-values need to be described and quantified in non-monetary terms.[2]
I also use the terms “fossil capitalism” and “fossil capital”. These are intended to highlight the way in which capitalism in general, and capital in particular, are presently – and overwhelmingly – built on the use of fossil fuels.[3]
2.1. Flows and stocks
We can look at all societies and economies as consisting in the movement of physical matter. Those movements can be quantified – as with value accounting – by looking at various flows and stocks of materials.
In broad terms, we can think of material stocks and flows as providing various “services”.
For example, clay is extracted from the ground, shaped and fired into bricks, and assembled with mortar to build walls and a home. This dwelling is a building “stock” as long as it stands, and it provides the “service” of shelter.
Living space may need heat and light: both of these are flows of energy derived from some fuel stock. People require some flow of water, a supply of food, and some means of discharging effluents and waste.
And different services require different combinations of material stocks and material flows.
The built environment comprises a variety of such stocks of materials, constructed together out of material flows. Built stocks are placed in relation to one another according to the social relations that form the context for construction. And the useful life of a built stock then involves it as a site for channelling various other subsequent flows.
Stocks and flows can address social needs directly. However, in the context of capitalism, stocks and flows tend to dispense social benefits only insofar as they benefit the proprietors of capital.
Beyond that, material stocks and flows are bound to be directed to benefit some people and not others – they may even dispense deliberate harms to others, as is obviously the case with the activities of a military installation.
Moreover, in the contexts of the long history of capitalism and colonialism, material stock accumulation and material flows have occurred for the benefit of some and to the wholesale detriment of others, generating wave after wave of social and environmental violence.
2.2. Material footprints and carbon footprints
Material footprint (MF) is a consumption-based indicator of resource use that seeks to capture the mass of material flows along a supply chain, or across the breadth of an economy.
The concept of carbon footprint (CF) has been used in different ways, but nowadays usually refers to the mass of atmospheric emissions – measured as CO2 equivalent (CO2e) – that can be attributed to an activity or process. It is an indicator for global warming potential.[4]
These concepts are just some of the means available to quantify material use and/or environmental impacts – for example, those of a country, a company, a supply chain, a household, or an individual. They are “material accounts” data – as opposed to economic data based on monetary value.
When you look at material or carbon (or any other) footprints, you can also choose to look at things from the perspective of either production or consumption.
A production-based approach looks at the sum of materials consumed, or the emissions produced, in the course of the normal activities of a company or region – it is focused on economic inputs and processes. In the case of countries, a production-based perspective is also referred to as a domestic-based, or a territorial-based perspective.
A consumption-based approach looks instead from the point of view of end-consumers, and seeks to quantify what they consume, and then allot an appropriate material or emissions footprint to that consumption, based on the share of consumption. However, end-consumption is not always easy to define.
At the global level, the sum of all production footprints equals the sum of all consumption footprints, setting aside loss and wastage. For example, global consumption- and production-based emissions are identical – and become skewed one way or the other at the local level, according to the balance of international trade.
Rich countries import emissions-intensive goods from elsewhere, and this shows up in comparisons of production- and consumption-based emissions, such as one by Our World in Data.
You can also choose to refer only to the direct (“on-site”) impacts of the final stage of material use, or you can take a more holistic approach, and consider as well all of the indirect (“off-site”) materials and environmental impacts upstream in a supply chain that are effectively contained (“embodied”) in the product consumed.
For example, when you look at the total domestic consumption-based emissions of a region, and include indirect emissions, that will include all of the emissions due to production abroad, and effectively embodied within imports. It will also exclude the emissions of domestic production that are effectively embodied in exported goods.
2.3. Embodied emissions and operational emissions
Just as with any other commodity, so with the built environment: it is useful to distinguish between the materials and emissions associated with the production of something, and with its use.
The materials, emissions, and anything else that go into producing something are said to be embodied in the end product. Everything associated with a product’s end-use is said to be operational.
As outlined above, a comprehensive accounting will include all of the direct and indirect materials and impacts that feed into the provision of some material thing or “service”.
In the case of the stock of buildings and infrastructure, the embodied materials and emissions comprise everything that goes into construction.
This encompasses production of all the physical inputs that go into the bricks and mortar. But it also includes everything that goes into, or comes out of, construction, alongside the bricks and mortar: labour processes, upstream supply chains, transport, energy, disposal of waste streams, installations of plant and machinery, and a lifetime of maintenance after the initial construction has ended. Plus any deconstruction, demolition or disposal at the end of a building’s or piece of infrastructure’s lifetime of use.
These things are often mis-allocated in consumption-based footprint data – a point I will come back to.
Meanwhile, operational footprints are all the material flows and waste streams associated with a normal lifetime of use after production or construction. Again, this should include indirect as well as direct material use and impacts.
In the case of a building, this mostly comprises utilities: electricity, heating, water.
As above, operational footprints conventionally do not include aspects of maintenance and replacement that are carried forward as part of the embodied footprint.
The embodied and operational footprints of the built environment, when assessed on a consumption basis, will end up distributed across the end consumption categories of the economy. Much of that is via the “intermediate consumption” of corporations.
But all elements of the built environment are constructed to provide some “service”. And every such structure therefore has its own stock-flow / embodied-operational material profile. Depending on how it is designed and made, this will be reflected in a balance of standard operational costs, in both material and monetary terms.
As for the climate burdens associated with the built environment, we are usually concerned primarily with identifying and minimising embodied emissions (or “embodied carbon”) and operational emissions (or “operational carbon”). These are the atmospheric emissions, measured as amounts of CO2e, embodied in the production and disposal of a building or piece of infrastructure, and those emissions spent while using it during its lifetime of use.
These are the main targets of decarbonisation in the built environment.
2.4 Life Cycle Analysis
We can also consider how material flows and environmental impacts vary across the whole life cycle of a product – from production to consumption, through to end-of-life disposal. A nose-to-tail, cradle-to-grave analysis of this sort is a Life Cycle Analysis / Assessment (LCA), or a Whole Life Cycle Analysis / Assessment (WLCA).
However, there are truncated LCAs, such as so-called cradle-to-gate (i.e. cradle-to-use) analysis. These refer to the material footprint or carbon footprint of a product of manufacture as it leaves the factory gate or showroom, pending whatever happens to it thereafter.
Life cycle analysis is an evolving science. It is not always scientifically clear where the boundary of a life cycle should be drawn, and how far up the materials supply chain you need to go.
Such decisions usually involve some form of political judgement.
In the case of a building or piece of infrastructure, all the embodied emissions, plus all the operational emissions, comprise the whole life cycle emissions.
As climate issues move to the centre of politics, WLCAs are becoming standard. And with them has come great pressure from the construction industry to turn them on their heads: to use them for greenwashing, instead of for making the carbon load of buildings transparent.
Buildings represent a significant investment of capital – and unlike with infrastructure, buildings construction is usually undertaken on the initiative and expense of private businesses. Those businesses have a keen interest in seeing a return on their investment.
And yet, in jurisdictions where environmental factors have become an important political consideration, a WLCA can now help determine whether, and in what form, a building gets made. Can a new building be justified, especially where it depends on demolishing an already existing one?
In London, for example, WLCAs are all the rage with new developments, and they are part of most new planning applications. However, as Will Ing, the specialist construction journalist, notes, it is the developers that pay consultants to carry out those assessments. There is now “widespread concern that he who pays the piper calls the tune”.
Henrietta Billings, director of SAVE Britain’s Heritage, told Ing: “Few planning departments have the expertise or resources to scrutinise WLCAs with the rigour required.”
Simon Sturgis, an expert on WLCAs, has found that consultants working for developers might set up a straw man: they overstate the operational inefficiencies and embodied costs of simply refurbishing an existing building, and talk up the gains and downplay the drawbacks of demolition and replacement.
That seems to have been done, for example, with plans to redevelop sites around the Barbican. However, Sturgis says that while the data in an WLCA can contain errors, the qualitative analysis in the accompanying report is more likely to be misleading.
Ing quotes another expert, Charlie Baxter: “It’s clear that planning officers and GLA [Greater London Authority] officials rely on [planning] applicants being open and honest.” He thinks there should be independent audits – as with tax returns – and that, if a planning applicant’s WLCA contains errors, there should be legal and financial penalties.[5]
In my view, these forms of analysis will continue to be essential for constructing a politics to decarbonise the global economy, and for engineering a genuinely restorative approach for all forms of environmental harm.
But to be effective, footprint analysis and whole life assessments need to be autonomised from the interests of capital – and from the political economy of capitalist development.
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| How architects visualise Life Cycle Assessment of a building’s carbon emissions. Source: LETI Climate Emergency Design Guide, 2020, and LETI Embodied Carbon Primer, 2020 |
So how does the built environment fit into broader trends of material consumption and emissions?
The International Energy Agency (IEA), working with the UN Environment Programme (UNEP), has for a number of years compiled carbon footprint data for the built environment. These will be discussed more in later parts of this series.
However, it is easy to get blinded by sectoral numbers, in the absence of other information to give a sense of scale.
Here is a brief survey of the main conventions and findings of consumption- and production-based footprints, which should give a better sense of how the built environment’s footprints fit into the larger picture.
a. Country-based footprints
The most familiar, and commonly-used material footprint and carbon footprint indices are country-based. The dominant convention is for the total quantities of material use or emissions to be attributed to a country as a whole – or to the population as a whole, on a per-capita basis.
The convention is widespread, because it fits with the agenda of national policy responses to climate change. International treaties on emissions, such as the 2015 Paris Agreement, are all production- (territorially-)based.
However, a disadvantage analytically of doing things by country is that it lumps everyone and everything in each country together, abstracting away internal differentiation within countries, according to social class, geography, wealth and income; and according to different areas of the economy.
The International Energy Agency (IEA), working with the UN Environment Programme (UNEP), has for a number of years compiled carbon footprint data for the built environment. These will be discussed more in later parts of this series.
However, it is easy to get blinded by sectoral numbers, in the absence of other information to give a sense of scale.
Here is a brief survey of the main conventions and findings of consumption- and production-based footprints, which should give a better sense of how the built environment’s footprints fit into the larger picture.
a. Country-based footprints
The most familiar, and commonly-used material footprint and carbon footprint indices are country-based. The dominant convention is for the total quantities of material use or emissions to be attributed to a country as a whole – or to the population as a whole, on a per-capita basis.
The convention is widespread, because it fits with the agenda of national policy responses to climate change. International treaties on emissions, such as the 2015 Paris Agreement, are all production- (territorially-)based.
However, a disadvantage analytically of doing things by country is that it lumps everyone and everything in each country together, abstracting away internal differentiation within countries, according to social class, geography, wealth and income; and according to different areas of the economy.
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| Consumption-based greenhouse gas emissions data, measured per head of population. Source: Hannah Ritchie, Pablo Rosado & Max Roser / Our World in Data |
b. Footprints measured by economic sector
Another more economistic convention is for emissions to be attributed to different categories of “end-consumption”, the same way economic indices of consumption are partitioned in national accounts data.
This gives five mutually-exclusive end-consumption categories: consumption by households, consumption by “nonprofit organisations serving households” (NPISH), consumption by government, consumption for “gross capital formation”, and consumption for changes in inventories and valuables.
These statistics – like all statistics! – do not provide a full picture. By focusing on end uses, they leave out of account the process by which the consumed goods came to be made.
For example: as you can see in the second of the next two graphs, four-fifths of the category “household emissions” are “indirect emissions”. This includes emissions from concrete and steel production that go into building people’s homes, electricity generation that supplies households with light and heat, and farming that provides their food – processes over which they have little or no control.
Some researchers have designated consumption of these goods and services, produced by systems the end consumer cannot control, as “non-discretionary”, in contrast to “discretionary” consumption associated with the end consumer’s own decisions. (See also point (c) below.)
Nevertheless, these five categories provide more information about the materials economy of a given country, and the consumption drivers of emissions, than we get when simply lumping everything together into one country index.
You can also add together all those separate country-based end-consumption carbon footprints, to get a picture of how global end-consumption drives emissions. On this basis, a good estimate (based on 2007 data) is that demand from global household consumption drives around 65% of the global carbon footprint; “gross capital formation” drives around 24%; and government expenditure about 7%.
Those results come from a materials database called EXIOBASE, which covers the economies of 43 countries, and about 90% of global GDP. The data are illustrated below.
In this graph, the first three rows show different breakdowns of (i.e. different ways of looking at) the same emissions. The last two rows are included for comparison. The carbon footprint of all US households comprised 16% of all global emissions.
The US military is notoriously polluting, with a notoriously outsized carbon footprint. So I have also included the carbon footprint of the US Department of Defense (USDoD), according to data from the US Department of Energy. 2008 is the earliest year for which USDoD carbon footprint data is available, and it was 0.086 gigatonnes of carbon dioxide equivalent (Gt CO2e) (0.25% of 2007’s global emissions).
If we attribute the carbon footprint of the USDoD in 2008 to the US population, it was about 0.28 tonnes CO2e per person. The per capita carbon footprint (production-based, CO2 only) of the whole economy of Afghanistan in 2008 was 0.15 tonnes CO2 per person – in 2011 it had risen to 0.40 tonnes, but by 2018 had declined back down to 0.22 tonnes CO2 per person. (Consumption-based data for Afghanistan seem to be unavailable.)
In any case, looking into the global household data a little more, you can see how global household consumption-based emissions were weighted in 2007. In the graph below, the three rows show different breakdowns of the same emissions.
Another more economistic convention is for emissions to be attributed to different categories of “end-consumption”, the same way economic indices of consumption are partitioned in national accounts data.
This gives five mutually-exclusive end-consumption categories: consumption by households, consumption by “nonprofit organisations serving households” (NPISH), consumption by government, consumption for “gross capital formation”, and consumption for changes in inventories and valuables.
These statistics – like all statistics! – do not provide a full picture. By focusing on end uses, they leave out of account the process by which the consumed goods came to be made.
For example: as you can see in the second of the next two graphs, four-fifths of the category “household emissions” are “indirect emissions”. This includes emissions from concrete and steel production that go into building people’s homes, electricity generation that supplies households with light and heat, and farming that provides their food – processes over which they have little or no control.
Some researchers have designated consumption of these goods and services, produced by systems the end consumer cannot control, as “non-discretionary”, in contrast to “discretionary” consumption associated with the end consumer’s own decisions. (See also point (c) below.)
Nevertheless, these five categories provide more information about the materials economy of a given country, and the consumption drivers of emissions, than we get when simply lumping everything together into one country index.
You can also add together all those separate country-based end-consumption carbon footprints, to get a picture of how global end-consumption drives emissions. On this basis, a good estimate (based on 2007 data) is that demand from global household consumption drives around 65% of the global carbon footprint; “gross capital formation” drives around 24%; and government expenditure about 7%.
Those results come from a materials database called EXIOBASE, which covers the economies of 43 countries, and about 90% of global GDP. The data are illustrated below.
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| The consumption-based carbon footprint of 43 big economies. Sources: * Diana Ivanova et al. (2015); US Department of Energy |
In this graph, the first three rows show different breakdowns of (i.e. different ways of looking at) the same emissions. The last two rows are included for comparison. The carbon footprint of all US households comprised 16% of all global emissions.
The US military is notoriously polluting, with a notoriously outsized carbon footprint. So I have also included the carbon footprint of the US Department of Defense (USDoD), according to data from the US Department of Energy. 2008 is the earliest year for which USDoD carbon footprint data is available, and it was 0.086 gigatonnes of carbon dioxide equivalent (Gt CO2e) (0.25% of 2007’s global emissions).
If we attribute the carbon footprint of the USDoD in 2008 to the US population, it was about 0.28 tonnes CO2e per person. The per capita carbon footprint (production-based, CO2 only) of the whole economy of Afghanistan in 2008 was 0.15 tonnes CO2 per person – in 2011 it had risen to 0.40 tonnes, but by 2018 had declined back down to 0.22 tonnes CO2 per person. (Consumption-based data for Afghanistan seem to be unavailable.)
In any case, looking into the global household data a little more, you can see how global household consumption-based emissions were weighted in 2007. In the graph below, the three rows show different breakdowns of the same emissions.
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| Source: * Diana Ivanova et al. (2015) |
This graph also shows that the world’s direct household emissions arise about 25% from home fuel – such as for heating, cooling, and cooking. The other 75% is for private transport. Most indirect emissions are associated with home life, however, not cars.
c. Income groups’ footprints
There are very large distributional skews in the economy, between states and within them, reflecting society’s vast inequalities. Global consumption-based emissions are dominated by higher-consumption societies and individuals – as the large total for US household emissions makes clear.
In particular, when a person has greater wealth or income, they also tend to consume and emit more, wherever they live. Discretionary individual and household consumption are said on the whole to expand in proportion to income, once “non-primary” needs are met: this trend has been researched both within and between countries.[6]
But, crucially, this is subject to local conditions. The strong relationship between income and emissions varies significantly from country to country and region to region, according to different consumption norms.
Those norms, in turn, are determined by numerous political, economic and cultural factors – for which the form of the built environment is a crucial mediating factor. For example, compare the car-centric US to the bicycle- and pedestrian-centric Netherlands – each of which were the product of concrete struggles (see below).
Beyond that, as a general trend, economic inequality between countries – in terms of income and wealth – has been declining in recent years, as economic inequality within countries has increased. These shifts have in turn produced a general recomposition of the balance of global material consumption and consumption-based emissions.
One influential way that these phenomena have been captured is in a series of joint studies by Oxfam and the Stockholm Environment Institute (SEI).
Based on the observed correlation between household income and household consumption, they argue that people are “responsible” for all forms of national end-consumption (not just “household” consumption), in proportion to their individual income and consumption. This method is simplifying; however, in my view it does offer a helpful snapshot of the uneven “responsibilites” for global warming, internationally.
In their 2020 study, Oxfam/SEI partitioned the national CO2 emissions of 117 countries according to the spread of individual income within those countries, for the years 1990-2015. (These studies exclude non-CO2 emissions.) On that basis, their data signal the skew of CO2 emissions responsibility at the world level, among “global citizens”, and how this has changed over time.
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| Source: UNEP (2020), based on Oxfam/SEI (2020) |
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| Source: Oxfam/SEI (2020). Note: the Theil Index is a statistical measure of inequality that can be applied (as here) to income data. See also here in the Oxfam/SEI report |
In 2015, the top 1% of the world’s population by income were all those earning over US$109,000 a year – about 60 million people – and according to this study they were responsible on average for 74 tonnes of CO2 emissions per person per year, which was around 15% of world CO2 emissions. The top 10% were those earning over US$38,000 – about 770 million people, responsible for around 23.5 tonnes of CO2 per person, around 49% of world CO2 emissions.
For comparison, the per-capita national, consumption-based CO2 emissions of the US in 2018 were 17.51 tonnes CO2 per person. The EU-27’s were 8.08 tonnes CO2, the UK’s a few grammes lower. For China, it was 6.50 tonnes CO2; India, 1.75 tonnes CO2; Nigeria, 0.65 tonnes CO2.
The top-left graph also shows how large the computed carbon footprints are, compared with where the global average would need to be to meet the Paris goal of constraining global warming to 1.5C above pre-industrial temperatures: 2.1 tonnes CO2 per person.
Most acutely, the top 0.1% of the world’s population by income are responsible, by the Oxfam/SEI model, for a ginormous 216.7 tonnes of CO2 emissions per person per year on average. Whereas the whole of the bottom 50% of the world’s population by income account for, on average, 0.69 tonnes CO2 emissions per person per year.
A similar study, by the World Inequality Lab, written up in Bloomberg, makes the stark point that the top 1% by income are responsible for half the world’s aviation emissions – and that 10% of the flights that left France in 2019 were via private jet.
2.6. Capital’s hidden footprints
The level of emissions worldwide is unsustainable, and the emissions attributable to individuals with higher wealth and income are appalling. Nevertheless, it is not true that all material use and emissions can be pegged to individual consumption. Individual consumer choice is important, but it is not the only factor – nor perhaps the most politically salient.
For starters, companies and states use materials and energy, often only notionally on behalf of their customers and populations – in order to develop stocks of fixed capital, infrastructure, housing, welfare systems and militaries.
As far as the built environment is concerned, few people have any immediate choice about how they “consume” infrastructure, or the buildings they use, such as homes. Those are political and commercial decisions, in which the average person does not have much agency.
Also, the material economy is not just about the movement of physical materials. It is about the application of labour and technology to change the form of physical materials. It is about the production of economic value on that basis, exploitation, the exercise of political power, ownership and dispossession, the distribution of profit, and the exchange of commodities: goods for money. These are the social factors that determine the overall shape of material consumption – and indeed, much of the built environment.
So when we look at production or consumption aggregated according to national populations, or divided into disembodied industrial or manufacturing or service sectors, the social conditions that drive the economy in the first place can be obscured.
What drives the economy are capital, states, and – this brings us back to the 1% and the 0.1% – individuals with directive power over them, subject to laws of competition, and more often than not engaged in rivalrous consumption of the earth’s resources.
Those who consume a lot tend also to be the same people who govern societies and direct capital investments – so they have a “double responsibility”.
For example, companies and company bosses gain economically from production and consumption, even though that gain is not captured by physical accounts data. Moreover, it is the prerogative of “business” – and states in hoc to capital – to direct and shape economic activity to make profit. They determine on that basis the possibilities for individual consumption.
A specific example is capital goods, which much consumption-based accounting treats as a form of final consumption, obscuring the role of capital and its power. (See Appendix 1, in the PDF version.)
Households and individuals, in turn, can only consume things that businesses find it profitable to produce, or that states provide outside of market competition – and in ways that states legislate to allow.
Business gains, in turn, are based on a fundamentally antagonistic relationship between capital and labour, and between capital and the wider community – notwithstanding strategic truces at times. Capital’s relationship with the environment is neglectful at best, but more usually systematically extractive and destructive.
And as skews in individual material footprints and carbon footprints are driven by disparities in income and wealth, so those skews themselves are the product of class relations: of the fact that some people derive income from their labour alone, while others derive income from capital and other forms of property, over which they may have directive power.
Within the waged sector, there are also plainly sharp differentiations of seniority and reward, that place the interests of certain workers closer to the interests of capital.
Individual wealth, meanwhile, is the accumulated stock of capital and other forms of wealth: flows of income that are surplus to the economic necessities of daily life – and transmitted intergenerationally as inherited wealth. The top 10% by income, the top 1%, and the top 0.1%, are those with the main collective stocks of global wealth.
In any case, footprint analysis does not have to overlook all these social determinants – but there is a risk that it does.
And because physical accounting does not usually talk about value accounting, it can also be a tool of misdirection. Notoriously, individual carbon footprints have been promoted by corporations – most notably, BP – in an effort at greenwashing that also individualises the issue of responsibility for carbon-intensive consumption.
Meant to deflect attention away from BP’s own corporate interest, it also obscured the obvious environmental culpability of those directing its operations for at least the last 50 years.
These power relations, and politics, loom over footprints and emissions accounting. It is important that we do not lose sight of them.
🔥 Go to part 3
🔥Go to Contents and Introduction
Download the whole series as a PDF here
[1] This way, the material and environmental costs embodied in the construction of transport and energy infrastructure are usually allotted by analysts to the construction industry. But the material and environmental costs of the subsequent operational use of transport and of energy infrastructure – e.g. of burning coal in a power station or petrol in a car’s engine – are categorised separately, as arising directly from the energy and transport sectors
[2] In Marx, exchange-value is the rate of exchange of between any two commodities. One of those commodities is usually money
[3] Fossil Capital is a book by Andreas Malm
[4] Carbon footprints reflect the different global warming potential of different greenhouse gases, usually over 100 years. So for example, a tonne of carbon dioxide emissions is 1 tonne of CO2e, but a tonne of methane emissions over 100 years is said to have the same effects as 25 tonnes of CO2e – it has a GWP of 25; a tonne of nitrous oxide is equivalent to 290 tonnes of CO2e, so the GWP of nitrous oxide is 290 when calculated on a 100-year basis
[5] See here for Simon Sturgis’s own criticisms of London’s councils
[6] Examples here and here
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