On the other hand, farms for catfish and shrimp often require a large amount of energy to recirculate water and can sometimes have a larger climate footprint than even beef. You could incorporate more mollusks into your diet. We have recipes for you right here. A number of studies have found that milk typically has a smaller climate footprint than chicken, eggs or pork per pound.
Yogurt, cottage cheese and cream cheese are similar to milk. But many other types of cheese, such as Cheddar or mozzarella, can have a significantly bigger footprint than chicken or pork, since it typically takes about 10 pounds of milk to make one pound of cheese. It depends on the cheese. But broadly speaking, yes, if you decide to go vegetarian by, say, eating cheese instead of chicken, your carbon footprint might not fall as much as you expect.
To date, studies have disagreed on whether organic dairy farms produce more , less or about the same amount of greenhouse gas emissions as conventional farms do, per gallon of milk.
Most likely it varies a lot from farm to farm. But, as always, there are caveats and trade-offs to consider. Almonds require a lot of water to grow, and this has been a problem in places like California. Soy milk tends to be fairly low-impact, as long as the soy is sustainably farmed. If you like pasta with tomato sauce, hummus, avocado toast or peanut butter and jelly sandwiches, you actually do like some vegan food. Eating a fully vegan diet is hard for many Americans to imagine. And as more people become vegan, plant versions of ice cream, butter and even burgers are getting better all the time.
For home cooks, the challenge is often producing a vegan dinner that everyone at the table will eat. Another approach would be to simply eat less meat and dairy, and more protein-rich plants like beans, legumes, nuts and grains.
Here are recipes that go heavy on beans and grains. You could go vegetarian: no meat, poultry and fish, but dairy and eggs are allowed. The advantage here is that the rules are simple, and food manufacturers and restaurants are used to accommodating vegetarians.
We have vegetarian recipes for you that you can cook on a weeknight. Eating as a pescatarian, adding seafood to a vegetarian diet, can be a good compromise, and makes it easier to get protein into your meals. To keep some meat in your diet, try cutting back to one serving of red meat per week, replacing the rest with chicken, pork, fish or plant proteins.
This approach is more flexible, but it means more planning ahead and keeping track of what you eat. The average drop in food-related emissions when people switch from a typical Western diet to lower-impact ones:. Organic produce is grown without synthetic fertilizers or pesticides, which is important to a lot of people. In some cases, it can be a bit worse — organic farms often require more land than conventional farms. That said, there are a few things to consider. Things get trickier when it comes to out-of-season produce.
Some fruits and vegetables that are shipped by plane can have a surprisingly hefty carbon footprint. By contrast, apples, oranges and bananas are often shipped by sea, which is more fuel-efficient. Plenty of cold-climate vegetables, like carrots, potatoes and squash, can be stored after the fall harvest and last through the winter. If you live in the northern United States during the winter, it can be better to buy a tomato trucked in from California or Florida than to buy a local variety that was grown in an energy-intensive heated greenhouse.
By some estimates , Americans end up throwing out roughly 20 percent of the food they buy. That means that all the energy it took to produce that food was wasted. So minimizing waste can be a pretty straightforward way to curb emissions. There are lots of possibilities. If you cook, start with meal planning: Over the weekend, take 20 minutes to lay out three weeknight dinners, so that you buy only the food you plan on cooking. Trim and wash your produce before putting it away, to make it easier to use.
Be vigilant about eating or freezing the food in your refrigerator, instead of letting it spoil. Many foods with the exception of baby formula can still be safely consumed after that date.
When food is tossed into a landfill along with your other garbage, it begins to decompose and release methane into the atmosphere, where it warms the planet. Although a few American cities have started capturing some of this methane and recycling it for energy, most do not.
When composting is done right, the organic material in leftover food is converted into compost that can help grow crops, and methane emissions are cut significantly.
Some cities, like New York, have started setting up centralized composting programs or curbside pickup. Or you can follow these tips to compost at home. But in general, packaging makes up only about 5 percent of global food-related emissions. What you eat matters a lot more for climate change than the packaging it comes in. Other plastics at the store, like soda bottles or milk jugs, are tougher to avoid, but those can often be recycled. Recycling aluminum, plastic and paper can cut energy use and curb emissions.
Some experts have argued that there should be environmental labels on food , similar to nutrition labels. In theory, these labels could help interested consumers pick out lower-impact products and give farmers and producers more incentives to curb their emissions. How can dogs be white and trees green? Because carbon, an element, combines easily with other elements to form new materials. The new stuff, called compounds, are quite different from pure carbon.
An atom is the tiniest possible particle of any element, like carbon or oxygen. A carbon atom combines easily with two oxygen atoms to make the compound carbon dioxide. It is invisible. CO 2 is really important. Plants take in CO 2. They keep the carbon and give away the oxygen. Animals breathe in the oxygen and breathe out carbon dioxide. Plants and animals depend on each other.
It works out well. For hundreds of millions of years, plants and animals have lived and died. Their remains have gotten buried deep beneath Earth's surface. So for hundreds of millions of years, this material has been getting squished and cooked by lots of pressure and heat. For hundreds of millions of years, dead plants and animals were buried under water and dirt. Heat and pressure turned the dead plants and animals into oil, coal, and natural gas.
So what happens to all this dead plant and animal stuff? The Tokyo Olympics. And they have one tactic in common: buying carbon offsets. And together, these buyers are fueling a multibillion-dollar market for one of the more popular, and more controversial, tactics to limit greenhouse gases.
In particular, a growing number of people, fueled by peer pressure and shame, are reckoning with their emissions from air travel. The booming market for offsets falls into two broad categories: voluntary and compliance.
Voluntary offsets are the ones people and companies buy at their own discretion. And the markets are likely to grow even more. Spurred by demand from customers and pressure from their own employees , more than companies to date have pledged to become carbon-neutral by the middle of the century, if not sooner.
These private behemoths join 77 countries — the United Kingdom, the Marshall Islands, Costa Rica, Sweden — and more than cities that have set similar climate goals. Meeting these ambitious targets will eventually require decarbonizing completely, which is tougher for some countries and companies than others.
Those that currently depend on oil sales, natural gas heating, or coal-fired furnaces can nonetheless start making progress right away through buying offsets. With a carbon offset, a business, a government, or an individual can pay someone else to cut or remove a given quantity of greenhouse gases from the atmosphere.
That can take the form of buying cleaner-burning cookstoves in developing countries that reduce deforestation for firewood, or financing a wind turbine generator to displace fossil fuels on the power grid. It can also come as a credit for restoring a section of tropical forest that takes in carbon from the atmosphere. And unlike policies like a carbon tax, an offset is directly connected to a specific quantity of greenhouse gas emissions, at least on paper.
Yet carbon offset projects have a long history of overpromising and underdelivering, threatening fragile progress on climate change. Disagreements about rules around offsets also continue to derail international climate change negotiations. But advocates say that the enormous potential of offsets to combat climate change, protect nature, and route money to the parts of the planet that need it the most shows that they need to be part of the portfolio of solutions to limit warming.
Here are five of the most important things to know. At its core, an offset is an accounting mechanism. And offset schemes have been used successfully in the past to solve other environmental problems , like nitrogen oxide air pollution that contributes to acid rain.
But to reduce local air pollution, you need to have your offset in the vicinity of the pollution source, like a coal power plant. That global potential for action is a big reason that carbon offsets are such a valuable tool to address climate change. Carbon offsets range in size from a couple tons that an individual can purchase to gigatons that national governments buy to meet their own targets. And compared to other air pollutants, carbon dioxide is being emitted on a vastly larger scale, so both the demand and the opportunities for offsets are also greater.
Say, for example, that a steel mill wants to reduce its emissions — a smart idea because 5 percent of global greenhouse gas emissions come from iron and steel production.
But rather than waiting years for all the financing and infrastructure to fall into place to install new zero-emissions hardware or technology, the steel mill could start mitigating its emissions now by buying offsets. That could take the form of buying credits from a broker, who in turn channels money to people restoring a degraded coastal mangrove forest in Indonesia, for example. An acre of mangrove trees can store five to 10 times as much carbon as an acre of rainforest, and restoring huge swaths of these regions is much cheaper than upgrading industrial facilities.
The steel mill would then measure its greenhouse gas footprint and purchase an offset or credit for shares of a mangrove conservation project that would capture or reduce an equivalent amount of carbon dioxide. Offsets are typically packaged in discrete units, sold by a price per metric ton of carbon dioxide reduced. It works similarly at the international level. Some wealthier countries are reaching diminishing returns in reducing their greenhouse gas emissions.
Norway , for instance, already gets 98 percent of its electricity from renewable energy, mostly hydropower. But sectors like air travel are growing more difficult, expensive, and time-consuming to decarbonize as demand grows. On its way toward its goal of net-zero emissions by , Norway is cleaning up the remaining carbon-heavy sectors of its economy right now with offsets.
Working together, the countries could end up lowering emissions more than if they each tackled emissions on their own, getting vastly more greenhouse gas emissions reductions for their dollar.
And for emissions that currently have no cleaner alternative, like air travel, offsets may be the only way to mitigate their impacts on the environment. JetBlue announced in January that it aims to become carbon-neutral on all of its domestic flights by July of this year. Large new offset programs are in the pipeline too. California last year approved a tropical forest standard that would allow it to meet its climate goals by backing forest protection efforts in other countries.
But to limit climate change, humans have to zero out their net carbon output, and even start removing carbon dioxide from the air. That means the world will still have to throttle overall emissions. Essentially, additionality is a counterfactual: Does buying this specific offset lead to a reduction of greenhouse gas emissions that would not have happened otherwise?
If you pay someone who is already building a wind farm to displace a coal power plant, for instance, you may be helping them build a better business case for the project. But that chunk of renewable energy would have been built without your input anyway. On the other hand, if someone is about to clear a section of rainforest and you pay them not to, you have reduced the greenhouse gas emissions associated with deforestation.
The validation report for the project is 67 pages long and involved a site visit to confirm its performance, calculating and measuring how trees in the area grow over time, how water flows change, and how that influences carbon absorption. NativeEnergy , another carbon offset retailer, even coordinates site visits for buyers to see their projects firsthand.
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