Environment Forum
Global environmental challenges
True or false? Online shopping greener than the mall
Unless you’re in the habit of purchasing bulk orders when you shop online, you can ditch the notion you are helping the environment by skipping a trip to the mall, a recent study has found.
New research by The Institution of Engineering and Technology at Newcastle University in Britain shows online shoppers must order more than 25 items to have any less impact on the environment than traditional shopping due to resources required for shipping and handling.
The study looked at “rebound” effects — or unintended side-effects of policies designed to reduce carbon emissions — of activities that are commonly thought to be green.
Working from home is another commonly mistaken “green” activity, the study said. This practice actually increases home energy use by as much as 30 per cent, and can lead to people moving further from the workplace, stretching urban sprawl and automobile use which increases pollution, the study said.
“Policy makers must do their homework to ensure that rebound effects do not negate the positive benefits of their policy initiatives and simply move carbon emissions from one sector to another,” said Professor Phil Blythe, Chair of the IET Transport Policy Panel and Professor of Intelligent Transport Systems at Newcastle University that produced the report.
While the study focused on transportation issues in the UK, bringing the study to the U.S. could be beneficial for local policy planning, green technology website Green.blorge notes. ” What works in New York City or Boston won’t work for New Orleans or Jackson, Mississippi,” the website says.
“taking cars off the road”, or climate tokenism?
There’s no shortage of references these days in corporate and government reports to earnest, new steps to fight climate change. Often they promise to make carbon emissions cuts equivalent to taking millions of cars off the road…
For example, take Europe’s fourth biggest single source of carbon emissions, Britain’s Drax coal plant. It said in March that as a result of efficiency improvements it had cut carbon emissions equivalent to taking 195,000 cars off the road. But of course that was a cut against a theoretical projection of rising emissions — not an absolute cut.
Take a similar announcement from Canada this week. The oil industry in Alberta is busy trying to extract oil from tar sands. That is a far more polluting, energy-intensive way than just sucking the stuff out of oil wells, because steam must first be injected into the sand to make the oil flow. Now Alberta is experimenting with a technology, called carbon capture and storage, with three test projects which by 2015 would “achieve annual carbon dioxide reductions equivalent to taking about a million vehicles off the road”, the province says.
Funnily enough, 2015 is also the year when a U.N. panel of climate scientists says global greenhouse gas emissions worldwide must stop rising to limit global warming to 2-2.4 degrees celsius, a widely perceived threshold for dangerous effects (page 20 here). It seems a little disingenuous — in that wider context — for Alberta to talk of taking cars off the road from test projects to trim carbon emissions under a wider programme to expand one of the most polluting forms of oil drilling known to man.
The wider context does seem relevant if we’re not to pat ourselves on the back as catastrophic climate effects creep up. And it may be especially relevant this year, as climate talks and rhetoric ratchet up ahead of a meeting in December in Copenhagen, meant to seal agreement on a new climate pact to replace the Kyoto Protocol.
I am writing in response to Mr. Wynn’s article on “Biofuels will stoke Global Warming” I’m not sure if he researched the other side of the argument, but America produces enough resources to make biodiesel alone to provide the whole world with Biodiesel.It can be made cheaply by thinning vegetable-based oil or animal fat with alcohol, a process that any high school chemistry student can master. As so many are mistaken, no deforestation is required, food prices won’t go up, and it will reduce Americas dependence on foreign oil. Shouldn’t we learn to be more self sufficient?
While the concept of a rebound effect is important and should be illustrated, the two specifics cited in this article seem to differ substantially in this way:
While I can’t really know about the environmental impacts of shipping a package from an online merchant to my home, I have a lot of say in how much my personal energy usage increases or decreases due to working from home.
The implied assumption that people who work at home live in sprawl-land and not in a fairly dense urban area may not be true. In fact, working from home is more convenient if one lives near coffee shops, business customers, libraries, and other places to either conduct business or get out of the house while still being productive. Taking a short walk in a real community also is beneficial to a home worker.
These features typically occurs not in sprawling subdivisions but in more urban parts of a region.
Secondly, energy usage may increase at home but driving may decrease, and there is also a lower energy consumption at some workplace. I’ve yet to see a workplace where people are as careful about turning out the lights and generally stretching the organization’s money as they are at home.
Thirdly, what if there is more than one home worker in a household? That’s not unusual these days. The marginal energy cost of the second worker may be negligible.
But my point is that the work at home situation all depends on the particular circumstances, and they are circumstances an individual can judge. So perhaps it’s less productive to research working at home than on-line shopping.