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What is climate shadow?
The newest way to measure your impact on global warming.
Thanks for asking!
The subject of today's episode is a relatively recent addition to the ever-growing list of terms relating to climate change.
American writer Emma Patti introduced the idea of the climate shadow in a blog post for Mikecom in December 2021.
There's a more comprehensive metric for each person's impact on the climate crisis.
What exactly contributes to my climate shadow?
Our climate shadow pretty much includes everything we say and do.
Your electricity use, the petrol you use for your car, where you work, how you vote and even how much you talk about climate change.
Patty describes the climate shadow as being made up of three parts consumption, choices and attention.
Consumption means what we spend our money on as part of our lifestyles, so it could include online shopping, travel and energy consumption, amongst many other things.
Meanwhile, your choices include donations or investments, the number of children or pets you have, and your occupation.
Finally, intention includes how much effort you dedicate to raising awareness about environmental issues through activism, for example, or simply talking about it in everyday conversation.
Isn't that very similar to a carbon footprint?
The consumption part of the climate shadow concept more or less covers what we know as carbon footprint.
That idea dates back to the early 2000s and ironically was introduced by oil giant BP.
We'll get back to the significance of that in just a minute.
The thing is, Carbon Footprint deals exclusively with data and excludes certain other actions that can't be easily calculated, as well as the motivation behind those actions.
Patty's blog post mentions the example of a climate scientist who takes weekly flights to educate people about climate change.
That person would of course have a very high carbon footprint, but not necessarily a big shadow.
How useful is the concept of a climate shadow?
When BP brought in the carbon footprint calculator, all of a sudden the narrative shifted.
Individuals were being held accountable for greenhouse gas emissions instead of the fossil fuel industry.
It deflected responsibility and distracted people from taking collective action.
That's why climate shadow is so important.
It's an improvement because calculating our footprint typically encourages us to take individual low-impact actions, such as taking shorter showers and turning the lights off when we exit a room.
Sure, that's still helpful, but on its own won't come close to solving the world's problems.
Emma Patty spoke to the Big Story podcast about this in March 2022.
All of that energy would do so much more when put towards things like climate activism, you know, climate journalism, or just even talking about climate change.
By focusing on individual consumption habits, we lose sight of the big picture and fail to hold larger corporations and politicians accountable.
We also need to recognise the social action that we can take, like having a conversation at our workplace or with our landlord about switching to renewable energy.
Not only should we be paying attention to our carbon footprint, But we need to be actively spreading awareness and supporting companies that care about our planet.
There you have it.
Now you know what climate shadow is.
In under three minutes, we answer your questions.
What would you like to know about?
Use the comments section to send us your questions.
