The overlapping systems causing climate change
The dirty design of humanity’s most important systems
There’s no doubt that emissions from human activity cause climate change, but that wasn’t always the case. Greenhouse gas emissions began increasing exponentially in just the last two centuries. What changed?
In short, industrialization happened. Industrialization and technological development helped humanity break free from resource constraints that previously limited growth.
Steam power and mechanized production catalyzed the first industrial revolution. New forms of transportation (steamships & locomotives), better building materials (steel & cement), and mechanized factories made production & transportation much faster. Agricultural innovations like the cotton gin and steel plow made feeding the growing population possible.
The second industrial revolution brought electric lights, mass production, gas-powered automobiles, and more efficient ways to produce the materials needed to build modern infrastructure. Fertilizers, pesticides, and irrigation dramatically increased agricultural output. Widespread refrigeration made it easier for ordinary people to store food over long periods for the first time. Capitalism helped create the economic & financial conditions for growth.
As a result, the global population has grown by ~8x, and global GDP has increased by approximately ~80x over the last 200 years.
Our growth story is inspiring, but it’s also the story of climate change. Industrialization helped us build the tools & systems that make modern life possible, but those systems are also terrible for the environment.
Humans emitted nearly 50 Gt—55 billion tons—of CO2 equivalent in 2019.1 Over 90% of those emissions can be attributed to the energy system, food system, and the built environment (the physical infrastructure humans have built over time). What makes these critical systems so bad for the planet?
Energy powers progress (& most human emissions)
Modern luxuries like electricity, transportation & travel, and comfortable shelter wouldn’t be possible without the energy system. We’ve learned how to harness energy sources for human use, but at a massive environmental cost.
Today, the majority of global emissions are caused by burning fossil fuels for electricity & heat, transport, buildings, and industrial processes. Even with heavy investment in renewables over the past few decades, fossil fuels still account for around 85% of global energy consumption.
Most power plants still use coal or natural gas to generate electricity. Most vehicles run on gasoline or other petroleum-based fuels.2 Most buildings rely on fossil fuels for heating & air conditioning. Most factories need fossil fuels to produce enough heat to make modern materials & finished products.
Fossil fuels give us the ability to generate enough usable energy to power a growing and increasingly industrial world. Unfortunately, human fossil fuel use is also the leading cause of greenhouse gas emissions and climate change.
The system is designed to run on fossil fuels. Until that changes, humans will have to settle for dirty energy.
Feeding the world or destroying it?
The food system has been designed to produce enough food for Earth’s growing population, not to protect the planet. We’ve dramatically increased agricultural output & efficiency over time, but only by clearing vast swaths of land for crops & livestock.
We’ve cleared forests to grow more food and livestock, adopted highly polluting fertilizers, and developed fancy energy-intensive machines to make farming easier.3
Land use, crop production, and livestock have increased human emissions and decreased nature’s ability to remove carbon from the atmosphere (remember the carbon cycle?). Talk about a double whammy. The food supply chain is also highly polluting (and overlaps quite a bit with the energy system). Transportation, food processing, packaging, and retail account for a fifth of the food system’s emissions.
Today, the food system is responsible for nearly a third of global emissions. That figure will only increase as the population grows to around 10 billion by 2050.
We’ll need to increase food production by an estimated 50% or more to feed that many people. That means the food system will have to produce more than 7,000 trillion more calories per year than it does today, the equivalent of 1.5 million Big Macs for every person on Earth today.
The food system needs a redesign if we want to feed everyone and reduce food production’s contributions to climate change.
We all live in a material world
Steel and cement are the cornerstones of human infrastructure. Modern cities, factories, roads, and other structures wouldn’t be possible without them.4
These important materials are relatively cheap to make, easy to build with, and durable. Unfortunately, they are also two of the most polluting materials humans have ever made.
Steel production is responsible for over 5% of global emissions. We burn a significant amount of fossil fuels (mainly coal) throughout the steel-making process, and the chemical processes required to convert raw materials into steel release significant amounts of CO2.
Concrete production is even worse. Concrete is responsible for 8% of global emissions, more than the cumulative CO2 emissions of all trucks on the road. Energy use, chemical processes, and transportation of concrete make it the most polluting human-made material on earth.
The built environment provides a safe, comfortable setting for most human activities, but it is also one of the most significant contributors to climate change.
System ties run deep
Most complex systems are tightly interconnected with others. The energy, food, and infrastructure systems are no exception.
When you turn on the lights in your apartment, you aren’t just connecting a circuit that sends electricity to a light bulb. Most US power plants are powered by coal or natural gas. Someone mined that coal, transported it to a power plant by a gas-powered train, burned the coal to generate electricity, and transmitted it to your apartment through a complex energy grid.
When you open your fridge to grab oat milk for your morning coffee, you aren’t just enjoying a tasty beverage. The oats were grown on a massive farm (most likely in Russia) with polluting fertilizers and pesticides, harvested using fossil fuel-powered combine harvesters, exported on diesel-fueled ships to the US, and transported by gasoline-powered trucks to your local grocery store.5
These simple daily acts are made possible by deeply interconnected and polluting systems. This is why individuals’ efforts to reduce their carbon footprints typically have little effect on climate change overall. The systems themselves cause emissions, and we historically haven’t had much choice in the matter.
It’s popular to say that these systems are “broken” & need fixing. (Somebody should do something about this!) The reality is that these systems aren’t broken; they’re doing exactly what they’re designed to do. We need to redesign the systems causing climate change if we want the same results—abundant energy, tasty & nutritious food, and safe, comfortable infrastructure—with lower emissions.
In the future, we have to make sure our systems are designed to support growth and care for the planet. My next post will dive into some of the solutions that can help us accomplish both goals (a more hopeful topic than this one, that’s for sure).
And look out for deep dives on the energy system, food system, the built environment, and the financial system in future posts. In the meantime, thanks for reading Think in Systems!
Cover photo by Matthew Henry on Unsplash
CO2 is the most prevalent GHG (around 75% of all emissions), but human activity also emits methane (CH4), nitrous oxide (NO3), and other highly potent GHGs like hydrofluorocarbons (HFCs) & sulfur hexafluoride (SF6). CO2e converts all other GHG emissions to CO2 equivalents to allow for easier comparison of emissions across sectors and geographies. It’s important to note that CH4, NO3, HFCs, and SF6 are more potent than CO2 in terms of warming &/or staying power in the atmosphere. We need to curb these emissions just as badly as CO2 emissions & can make a big dent in warming by doing so.
According to the IEA, only 1% of passenger vehicles & light-duty trucks/vans on the road globally are electric vehicles. There’s hope, however: over 8% of global passenger vehicles produced in 2021 were electric or hybrid.
Cow burps & farts cause a surprisingly high 40% of methane emissions globally.
We produced 2 billion tons of steel and nearly 5 trillion tons of cement last year alone.
If you want to learn more, Vaclav Smil has a great book on the importance of steel called Still the Iron Age. Here’s an excerpt from the book’s description.
Although the last two generations have seen an enormous amount of attention paid to advances in electronics, the fact remains that high-income, high-energy societies could thrive without microchips, etc., but, by contrast, could not exist without steel.
Many cargo ships still use an extremely polluting fuel called bunker fuel, a byproduct of crude oil refinement.