Interview Daniel Moran
Earlier this year we did an interview with Daniel Moran, a Senior Scientist at the Norwegian Institute for Climate and Environment NILU, and a Research Professor in environmental economics at NTNU. Explore our conversation on carbon emission sand delve into his research study, "Quantifying the potential for consumer-oriented policy to reduce European and foreign carbon emissions."
*Replies have been edited for length and clarity.
Hey Dan😊
In your study on the potential for consumer-oriented policies to reduce carbon emissions, you discovered that a range of lifestyle changes could contribute to a significant 25% reduction in Europe's total carbon footprint. Can individuals truly make a substantial impact on lowering the overall carbon footprint?
This reduction is our team’s estimate of how much footprint reduction can come from individual behavior can change, such as using public transportation, energy efficiency measures at home, eating less meat, cutting down on air travel, and adopting more sustainable consumption habits. It is very hard to say how willing people are to change their lifestyles so this estimate is quite general, but to form it we did look systematically across a huge variety of individual behavior change options and consider what reasonable level of shifts we might see across society. Some individuals and households can change their footprint much more than this, but it is likely that others will at the same time increase their footprint.
Even though a 25% reduction is great we must remember that the European goal is to reduce our carbon footprint by 50% in the coming years, and within 25 years to become net zero. To achieve this, we need change to come from many places in society, and asking individual consumers to change their behavior is not enough.
It looks like us changing our disposal patterns has a minor effect - and that changing our transportation pattern is key here - can you share your thoughts on this?
When we think about major sources of greenhouse gas emissions – electricity, industry, food, buildings, and cars – transportation is a major category of emissions. Transportation is an area where it is comparatively easy to make a change, from car to electric car, or car to bike for example.
When it comes to the products we use, demand reduction - through more re-use and smarter recycling- is just one of the ways, alongside improving production efficiency, to reduce the footprint.
Among the people likely reading this article, addressing aviation emissions emerges as a significant aspect of the transportation system to focus on resolving.
I know that you calculated your personal footprint day by day for a period. And you found out that flying has a huge impact. Not new, but second up you found that public service also has a big impact on your personal footprint. So, if I would like to lower my personal climate footprint, I can stop flying, I can take shorter showers, I can recycle everything, and so on. But if the public service doesn't change, I would still have a quite big footprint?
Yes. In formal carbon accounting several perspectives are clearly defined. One approach is to attribute all pollution to the producers. This is called ‘direct emisisons’ or ‘scope 1’ emisisons. I’ve been interested in the footprint approach, sometimes called Scope 3 accounting, which attributes pollution to consumers. It is possible to compute a carbon footprint at any stage along any given value chain from raw extraction or harvesting, through all the trade and transformation stages to a final good or service we consume at home. The best way to think about this is about each actor’s sphere of control. Mining companies, manufacturers, and households all have a different sphere of actions they can control, but all three parties participate in the same value chain and can all help – directly, or indirectly though behavior change – to reduce those emisisons which may be occuring only at a few specific places along the chain.
Each of us, from a child to a company president, have a different scope and sphere of opportunities to make a change. If you think about your personal footprint that you have control over, indeed it is smaller than the total footprint per capita of the society we live in.
While thinking about our personal footprint is important, it is also important to think about what we can do individually to change the society we live in. Personally, I am really interested in how to reduce our societal footprint. By this I mean the energy and material use in shared facilities we may only use occasionally. This includes retail (shopping malls), apartment buildings, healthcare, defense, and public construction. The emissions associated with these shared goods are harder to target since there is no one person responsible for these facilities and each of us only use them some days or hours per year. So, when we think about our personal footprint we think about our house, car, clothing, and dinner. But if we only look at it only this way, nobody takes responsibility for the carbon footprint of the school, hospital, defense, roads, and so on.
So, to me, the focus on individual action is correct, but it's only a part of the picture. These days I'm very interested in engaging local government and organizations - groups that have more influence than individuals, and, in contrast to national government, often the ones in a position to make real changes.
If I really should start to do something in 2024, or stop doing something, with the aim to reduce carbon footprint. What should it be?
• Skip one long-haul flight.
• Lead a (radically?) green change in a collective organization you have a voice in - be it an office, school, or building.
• If you can adjust your savings or pension fund, shift to an ESG-minded fund. Passively invested money locks in business as usual behavior.