It wasn’t until Tesla hit a direct sales market that many manufacturers realized there was a consumer market for electric vehicles. Often, dealerships misled manufacturers that there was no need, and now they’ve been found to stand in the way of consumers purchasing them where companies like Ford are suing dealerships (source). While electric vehicles are great from a consumer perspective for fighting greenhouse emissions, it often feels like the onus of climate change is on the consumers. What about the companies? Who is responsible for reducing global emissions?

I’ve mentioned this before, but I am certified in Six Sigma. When we’re performing root cause analysis, we always want to focus on what addresses the majority of the problems. Usually, addressing the root cause will address 80% of the problem – or that’s the goal. Where do consumers and businesses place on that list with greenhouse emissions?

The big discussion now is regarding vehicles. The EPA (Environmental Protection Agency) notes that transportation causes about 27% of greenhouse emissions. Let’s be clear here: they’re referring specifically to carbon dioxide production. I have a few concerns with this statistic:

1. Transportation includes not only cars but also buses, freight, trains, planes, and transport ships
2. Transportation is 1/4 of carbon emissions
3. Carbon dioxide isn’t the only greenhouse gas

The IPCC (Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change) released a robust report in 2018 that I’ll refer to a lot here as it references hundreds of peer-reviewed scientific papers. “In 2004, the transport sector produced 6.3 GtCO2 [gigatons of carbon dioxide] emissions (23% of world human-caused CO2 emissions) and its growth rate is highest among the end-user sectors. Road transport currently accounts for 74% of total transport CO2 emissions” (IPCC). This provides a narrower idea that a major portion of carbon emissions is specific to buses, cars, and semi-trucks. Narrower still, the study points to light-duty vehicles (LDVs) as producing 44% of energy usage.

Why is this important? Because 44% (LDVs) of 27% (transportation) is ~12% of all CO2 emissions. This means that even if all consumers switched to electric vehicles – and for the sake of argument ignoring the impact of electricity required to manufacture and refuel those vehicles – is still only 12% of all global carbon emissions. Freight trucks account for another 26% of emissions for transportation.

The beef industry alone accounts for more emissions than our cars at 14% of greenhouse emissions. If we, as consumers, want to make a bigger impact on climate change then we should address how much beef we consume more than what cars we purchase. They’re tearing down the Amazon forests (a huge carbon dioxide sink) to build these ranches. This is a bigger problem than vehicles.

Here is my concern: 12% isn’t 80% of the problem. It’s not even close. Even including freight vehicles in the equation is still 19% of the carbon dioxide emissions. While EV is probably not ideal for freight – and they’re primarily focusing on hydrogen fuel for that reason – how do we address the other 71% of emissions? We could talk about the resources required to manufacture EVs. This is a moot point since a vehicle has to be manufactured regardless of whether it’s a combustion engine or an EV. And, yes, mining lithium is probably not ideal either. We could also argue about the electricity required to power an EV, but consumers don’t determine how electricity is produced. This leads me to the next two chunks of industry and electric power at 24% and 25%, respectively.

80% of oil, gas, and coal account for greenhouse emissions related to power. Oil is nearly 40% alone. With the global population continually growing, more power is required to keep up with production. “In 2004, emissions from power generation and heat supply alone were 12.7 GtCO2-eq (26% of total emissions) including 2.2 GtCO2eq from CH4. In 2030, according to the World Energy Outlook 2006 baseline, these will have increased to 17.7 GtCO2-eq.” (IPCC).

To be fair, this is somewhat on consumers to simply stop producing more kids to contribute to the global population. From a business perspective, the IPCC states, “Approaches to encourage the greater uptake of low-carbon energy-supply systems include reducing fossil fuel subsidies and stimulating front-runners in specific technologies through active government involvement in market creation (such as in Denmark for wind energy and Japan with solar photovoltaic (PV)).” If the government eliminates fossil fuel subsidies and moves them towards green energy, then it would encourage businesses to switch to environmentally friendly electricity production. The downside, of course, is the impact on consumers to cover those costs. However, consumers are already impacted due to the rising costs of extreme weather events (source).

According to the IPCC, “Globally, and in most countries, CO2 accounts for more than 90% of CO2-eq GHG emissions from the industrial sector (Price et al., 2006; US EPA, 2006b). These CO2 emissions arise from three sources: (1) the use of fossil fuels for energy, either directly by industry for heat and power generation or indirectly in the generation of purchased electricity and steam; (2) nonenergy uses of fossil fuels in chemical processing and metal smelting; and (3) non-fossil fuel sources, for example cement and lime manufacture. Industrial processes also emit other GHGs, e.g.:

• Nitrous oxide (N2O) is emitted as a byproduct of adipicacid, nitric acid and caprolactam production;
• HFC-23 is emitted as a byproduct of HCFC-22 production, a refrigerant, and also used in fluoroplastics manufacture;
• Perfluorocarbons (PFCs) are emitted as byproducts of aluminium smelting and in semiconductor manufacture;
• Sulphur hexafluoride (SF6) is emitted in the manufacture, use and, decommissioning of gas insulated electrical switchgear, during the production of flat screen panels and semiconductors, from magnesium die casting and other industrial applications;
• Methane (CH4) is emitted as a byproduct of some chemical
  processes; and
• CH4 and N2O can be emitted by food industry waste
  streams.”

Many consumers generally don’t have control over these. While we could ask the “5 Whys” and get to “because there are more people” as a root cause, the fact remains that businesses have alternatives and must look into alternatives. For example, aluminum production itself accounts for 44,700 kilotons of carbon dioxide emissions out of 91,000 for non-ferrous metals followed by Ferrosilicon at 10,000 kilotons. These numbers consider mining refining, electrodes, emissions, and electricity. Could we blame aluminum? Sure, but when we break down the environmental cost of producing aluminum, we return to electricity accounting for 70% of the emissions.

Instead of rewriting nearly 1,000 pages that a panel of hundreds of scientists around the world wrote in the IPCC report, I’ll summarize it with this: both consumers and businesses are to blame. While there is certainly more we could do to reduce the population (exclude mass genocide please), medical science is also increasing our life expectancy. In that instance, the biggest impacts we can make as consumers include:

• Reuse – stop purchasing new things and buy used things (.e.g., cars, clothing, etc.). It’s used after the first time anyway.
• Reduce – think about the next purchase and ask yourself if you will use it. My wife has an interesting philosophy: If this item is $100, are you going to use it 100 times? Think about the burger you’re going to eat or the milk you’ll include in your coffee. There are earth-friendly alternatives for meats like pork and chicken. For milk, there are soy and oat alternatives that have significantly less impact than cows (almonds and rice are horrible for water, by the way). Also, avoid plastics at all costs. That means, yes, be willing to pay a couple of dollars more for plastic-free packaging if you can afford to do so.
• Recycle – The more we can reduce mining and tearing down trees through recycling, the better it will be for the environment. Recycled goods are one way to take advantage of things we’ve already used and should be put back into the system to be used by someone else. A majority of plastics are not recycled now that China stopped buying a majority of them.

The one thing we don’t have much control over is electricity production, and for that, the only power we have is to vote for politicians who want to hasten the decrease of emission-producing electricity and encourage green electricity. Whether or not those politicians act upon it is a different question entirely.