Our Cool Carpet scheme offsets all the GHG emissions of our Cool Carpet products during their entire life cycle, not just our production, which does only account for around 10%.
It’s actually not just carbon what we offset. It’s the following list of molecules with GHG potential, which could include all of these:
The US, Mexico, Canada, Bangladesh and Ghana have launched an initiative to cut the other green house gases (other than CO2). Methane, soot and HFCs contribute to around 1/3 to global warming. The US state department says that by tackling these gases we could slow warming by 0.5C.
This is a fantastic initiative, focused on tackling the low hanging fruit and less political than CO2. Let’s go for it, no brainer. But let’s not forget CO2…
The green deal is the main sustainability programme from the UK government. It aims to revolutionise the energy efficiency of properties. The idea is that properties could get energy improvements at no upfront cost, paying it through the savings from the energy bills. Here is a summary document that describes it.
Space heating is where the money is wasted. Let’s design the green deal so it works.
The beauty about full product transparency is that it gives you the real impact of products on absolute terms, rather than using clever metrics in the denominator. For example, both a small TV and a big TV should report their kgCO2, despite than a big TV is bigger.
Legislation based on full product transparency should also be on absolutes. For example, legislating energy efficiency in TVs should be by absolute kgCO2 or kwh consumption instead of diving that by the size or other metric.
The Germans proposed a scheme to divide the gCO2 of the cars by the weight of the cars. That’s wrong.
DG Klima has published a report about the analysis of options beyond 20% GHG emission reductions.
Some extracts:
This report from McKinsey gives a clear indication of what is going with global commodities and resources globally. Here are some extracts.
80% rise in steel demand projected from 2010 to 2030.
147% increase in real commodity prices since the turn of the century.
Up to $1.1 trillion spent annually on resource subsidies
$2.9 trillion of savings in 2030 from capturing the resource productivity potential
$3.7 trillion if carbon is priced at $30 per tonne, subsidies on water, energy, and agriculture are eliminated, and energy taxes are removed
70% of productivity opportunities have an internal rate of return of more than 10% at current prices
90% if adjusted for subsidies, carbon pricing, energy taxes, and a societal discount rate of 4%
The 15 opportunities identified by the report are:
1. Building energy efficiency
2. Increasing yields on large-scale farms
3. Reducing food waste
4. Reducing municipal water leakage
5. Urban densification (leading to major transport efficiency gains)
6. Higher energy efficiency in the iron and steel industry
7. Increasing yields on smallholder farms
8. Increasing transport fuel efficiency
9. Increasing the penetration of electric and hybrid vehicles
10. Reducing land degradation
11. Improving end-use steel efficiency
12. Increasing oil and coal recovery
13. Improving irrigation techniques
14. Shifting road freight to rail and barge
15. Improving power plant efficiency
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