Adapt: Why Success Always Starts with Failure by Harford Tim

Author:Harford, Tim [Harford, Tim]
Language: fra
Format: epub, mobi, pdf
ISBN: 9780748116041
Publisher: Hachette Digital
Published: 2011-04-19T22:00:00+00:00

4 ‘If I ask my old man “What’s the carbon footprint of a sheep?”, he looks at me as though I’m mad’

Euan Murray works for The Carbon Trust, an organisation set up by the UK government to help businesses reduce their carbon emissions. He’s responsible for ‘carbon footprinting’ – the study of how much carbon dioxide is released in the course of producing, transporting, consuming and disposing of a product. Murray spends his working life making the kind of calculations on which I relied to assess Geoff’s day, and he does it for corporate clients ranging from a bank (200 grams of carbon dioxide per bank account) to PepsiCo (75 grams of carbon dioxide for a packet of potato snacks). A red-haired, blue-eyed, young Scot, Murray is the modern face of climate-change action – dressed in a sharp shirt with cufflinks, he’s confident and straight-talking, at home with the technical details of carbon emissions without needing to fortify himself with jargon. He grew up on a sheep farm in southern Scotland, which gives him a suitably down-to-earth perspective on the messy task of calculating carbon footprints. ‘If I ask my old man “What’s the carbon footprint of a sheep?”, he looks at me as though I’m mad,’ he explains. ‘But he can tell me the stocking density, what he feeds the sheep, and he can answer those questions as part of running his business.’ Quite so: carbon footprinting is all about these kinds of specifics.

I chose to ask Euan Murray about Geoff’s moment of weakness in buying a fortifying cappuccino before stepping into the office. (Readers of my first book, The Undercover Economist, might have noticed a return to a favourite theme.) A cappuccino is easily as complex a product as Thomas Thwaites’s toaster: not only does it rely on the espresso machine – an impressive piece of equipment – but it also requires a cow, coffee beans, a cardboard cup, a plastic lid, and so on. Evaluating the carbon footprint of a cappuccino requires an estimate of the carbon footprint of all these different parts of the whole. You can see why I wanted expert help.

But Murray was only able to assist me up to a point. Carbon footprinting is a time-consuming business, and even taking a very broad view of what constitutes a product, there are many thousands of candidates for the footprinting treatment. (Recall Eric Beinhocker’s estimate that modern economies offer around 10 billion distinct products. Starbucks alone claims to offer 87,000 different beverages.) The Carbon Trust hasn’t been commissioned to calculate the footprint of a cappuccino just yet, so Murray falls back on educated guesswork.

‘Transportation is going to be small. Emissions from that are effectively zero, because you can fit a lot of sugar cubes and coffee beans on a boat.’ He starts to doodle as he works through the possibilities. ‘And sugar and coffee don’t require massive inputs of energy or other materials.’ After a few minutes blocking out the main possible greenhouse gas emissions

Download

Copyright Disclaimer:
This site does not store any files on its server. We only index and link to content provided by other sites. Please contact the content providers to delete copyright contents if any and email us, we'll remove relevant links or contents immediately.