It’s time for this unfortunate headline to go away. I see a variation of this posted in nearly every thread about climate and emissions, a complex topic that the average person understandably doesn’t know much about beyond some headline that stuck with them. Snopes has a good article debunking The Guardian’s grossly misleading headline.
To see the actual sources of GHG emissions, at least in the US, the EPA has good resources. In short, agriculture is 10% (methane from cows fits here), transportation is 28%, electric power generation is 25% (fossil fuel power plants generating electricity), residential and commercial buildings are 13% (in practice, the building sector overall is about a third of emissions after attributing the emissions from the electric power slice. Residential and commercial buildings use 75% of the power generated in the US), and finally industry is 23% (again, a bit more factoring in their share of the electric power emissions. Industry uses about a quarter of all power in the US).
As you can see, emissions, or at least GHG emissions, are spread across the economy. Some industries are heavy polluters (e.g. cement manufacturing), but that’s ultimately to make products for the market, even if they do have plenty of room to improve efficiency and reduce emissions, as do all other areas of the economy, especially buildings.
It’s time for this unfortunate headline to go away. I see a variation of this posted in nearly every thread about climate and emissions, a complex topic that the average person understandably doesn’t know much about beyond some headline that stuck with them. Snopes has a good article debunking The Guardian’s grossly misleading headline.
To see the actual sources of GHG emissions, at least in the US, the EPA has good resources. In short, agriculture is 10% (methane from cows fits here), transportation is 28%, electric power generation is 25% (fossil fuel power plants generating electricity), residential and commercial buildings are 13% (in practice, the building sector overall is about a third of emissions after attributing the emissions from the electric power slice. Residential and commercial buildings use 75% of the power generated in the US), and finally industry is 23% (again, a bit more factoring in their share of the electric power emissions. Industry uses about a quarter of all power in the US).
As you can see, emissions, or at least GHG emissions, are spread across the economy. Some industries are heavy polluters (e.g. cement manufacturing), but that’s ultimately to make products for the market, even if they do have plenty of room to improve efficiency and reduce emissions, as do all other areas of the economy, especially buildings.