Carbon not calories
Switch from calories to carbon for a healthier you and a healthier planet, today!
Disclaimer
Opinions expressed within the content are solely the author's and do not reflect the opinions and beliefs of any listed websites, their affiliates, any entity physical or otherwise, anything, anyone or any other form of matter that isn’t completely and uniquely, me.
21 March 2024
Have you realised our world is obsessed? We are obsessed with how we look, what we eat, where we work, how much money we make, how many dead lifts we can do, how much our country paid for a Taylor Swift concert …
Even in the sustainability industry, people are obsessed with how many acronyms you have memorised, how many technical terms you use in each sentence, and how many people we tag in our LinkedIn posts, oh how well you dress and how fancy your title is too - not to mention, how many courses, conferences, and awards you’ve attended.
The obsession is real. And it is everything but sustainable.
Everything is a competition, which frankly, is what got us all here in the first place.
We are a fast paced world that is fuelled by carbon.
The industrial revolution began in the 1700s, where the atmospheric carbon dioxide levels sat at 280 ppm. Air bubbles from millions of years before were tested for their concentration of CO2 and levels never went past 300 ppm. By 1958, C02 levels were already at 315 ppm. In 2023, they were at 417.06 ppm.
That means there were 417.06 particles of carbon dioxide in one million particles of air. That doesn’t sound like a big deal, right? Well, let’s break that down. In just 300 years, we managed to increase the concentration of carbon in the atmosphere by almost 140 ppm. That’s half of what we started with.
Carbon dioxide is an essential greenhouse gas. For those of us who remember our Geography classes, carbon dioxide along with other greenhouse gases are essential for the greenhouse effect which is what makes planet Earth habitable. If we didn’t have this phenomenon, we’d either be burned alive or frozen. Simply, the greenhouse effect keeps Earth at a temperature that works for us to survive by trapping just enough heat, but allowing the rest to escape. Our extra carbon dioxide levels are now causing an additional greenhouse effect. More heat is being trapped because there are more CO2 particles in air to trap them. And carbon dioxide is just one of the three main greenhouse gases (carbon dioxide, methane, nitrous oxide) that are skyrocketing and causing what we know as, global warming.
Our obsession to be bigger, better, stronger, faster is turbo charged by carbon.
I’ve had a few friends start counting their calories. As much as I feel I should be better with what I eat, I think it’s a highly unsustainable practice (for me). First of all, I’d never remember. I would also cheat like crazy. Thirdly, I know for a fact that certain healthy meals are way higher in calories than some other junk foods, which then makes me question the purpose of this method in the long run. Be skinny but highly malnourished? (**note disclaimer at the top)
As much as I don’t agree with counting calories, it did benefit me by sparking the idea for this article. What if we stopped being obsessed with how we looked and how many grams of protein we ate in a day, and instead started counting carbon? [I mean, at the end of the day, all the food we eat is going to be riddled with hormones, lacking nutrients, and full of GMOs anyway. So why not just enjoy it? YOLO, right?]
I digress.
Many countries practice load shedding. Take South Africa for example. In the middle of the day or for some hours at night, there is no water or power. Citizens have no choice but to deal with saving water, rationing, and switching of electricity or surviving with none at all. We put a quota on corporates for carbon, why aren’t we putting one on ourselves? If people had to pay a carbon tax or were slapped with a carbon quota, we’d be a lot healthier, as would the planet.
For one, we wouldn’t spend hours in offices, with lights and air conditioning and heating - we’d be at the beach, walking outside or resting under the shade of a tree. We’d be in the company of loved ones, or reading real paper books. We’d be learning and spending less time in front of the television. We’d spend less time in the shower and we’d spend more time being productive while we can. We’d cook, simple, nourishing, healthy food. Slow food.
Everything as we know it would slow down. We’d go back to simpler times. We’d even move slower to conserve energy. We wouldn’t be on our phones so much because we wouldn’t be able to charge them. We’d rise and sleep with the sun.
All good things.
Have you heard of the Paris Agreement? Well, it started off with saying that we had to limit the rise in temperature to 1.5°C, now it’s changed to “well below 2 degrees” by the end of the century. Did you also know, that in order to do this each of us has to reduce our greenhouse gas emissions to just 2 tonnes of CO2 per year by 2050? Even the most conservative Singaporean has exceeded this at least 6 times.
So let’s get to my point. What if, we all stopped being obsessed with food, weight, status, salaries, six-packs, and stardom and started obsessing instead about the fact that our only planet is galloping towards existential doom on the backs of four very scrawny equines?
Why are we obsessing about things that don’t matter? Maybe it’s a distraction based on the scarcity theory - that we feel that we have to take everything we possibly can for ourselves because there is not enough, and my needs come first! This mindset leaves us obsessed and depressed. But statistics have shown that we do have enough for everyone, all 8 billion of us. We have enough everything for every one of us.
A study by Damon Centola of The University of Pennsylvania found that it only took 25% of the population to cause a social tipping point – a point where a behaviour was found to be the norm once just ¼ of the population adopted it. Not very high, right?
We just need 25% of the population of the world to realise that we’re struggling for our future. We need to tip the scales in order to survive the pandemonium that will come if we continue with business as usual - just 25% of us to start counting carbon instead of calories.