Picture this — your carbon emissions as plastic straws

By Barry Saxifrage

I have littered the equivalent of 15 plastic straws every second, for hours on end, day after day. That’s how much climate pollution our family car littered out its tailpipe on the highway. But I didn’t appreciate how shockingly huge my polluting was because I couldn’t see it. Once I started picturing my fossil fuel CO2 as the equivalent amount of fossil fuel plastic litter, it completely changed my understanding of our climate pollution emergency, and my motivation to do something positive about it.

Climate pollution’s invisibility cloak has allowed Canadians, like myself, to emit dangerously huge amounts without even noticing. Here’s a visual carbon tour of what we are doing and some of the plastic litter visualizations I use to make it real to me.

Most of us know what the plastic pollution crisis looks like. Roadsides littered with plastic bags, beaches strewn with plastic detritus, and heartbreaking photos of animals choking on, or entangled in, plastic trash. It’s a visceral, in-your-face problem. And the quantities are huge — up to 32 million tonnes of it per year, by one estimate.

Unfortunately for the continued safety of our species, the climate pollution we are dumping into our air and oceans is a thousand times greater. But this particular form of fossil fuel pollution — CO2 — is invisible to humans. That invisibility cloak has allowed societies, businesses, and individuals to release hugely dangerous amounts, without seeing what we are doing.

Humanity’s out-of-sight fossil fuel CO2 pollution has grown so massive, it is starting to geo-engineer our planet.

Roughly half of what we emit stays in the atmosphere, acting like zombie heat pumps. These pump an additional 400,000 atomic bombs worth of energy every day into our already destabilized climate system. All that added energy is starting to super-size wildfires, droughts, storms, flooding, extreme heat, and is destabilizing major ecosystems.

Roughly a quarter of our CO2 pollution dissolves into our oceans, where it has caused a 30 per cent rise in acidity. That’s already causing widespread harm to many forms of marine life. And if we continue with business-as-usual fossil fuel burning, within the lifetime of today’s kids, ocean acidification levels are projected to reach a level last seen millions of years ago in the Miocene, fuelling a global extinction event.

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