How close can we get to Net Zero Carbon?

How realistic is it for the lighting industry to achieve Net Zero?

Next week, we’ll be sitting down with Recolight and the LIA discussing just that question.

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While we’re here, just give me the chance of a bit of a rant for a few minutes.

So just what do we mean by Net Zero?

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It’s a moveable feast, but there is a simple aim in view: to ensure that all of our works does not add to the release of greenhouse gases – carbon dioxide (CO₂) methane, nitrous oxide, etc – into the atmosphere. And if you want a more ambitious definition, its that we really need to reduce the amount of greenhouse gases in the atmosphere to a level not seen for half a century or more.

Here’s a graph that I saw a few years ago that opened my eyes to the problem:

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It’s a timeline of carbon emissions, starting from the time that James Watt and his pals started hawking around the idea of mobile rotary power, using nothing more complicated than coal and water. It was a great idea – and now it’s killing us.

Our Net Zero Carbon commitments are based on the belief that this vast uptick in carbon emissions is actually a problem. Now that’s a huge assumption, so what evidence are we working from? For late arrivals, this is what’s going on:

Greenhouse gases, of which CO₂ is one, perform the neat trick of allowing radiation from the sun into the earth’s atmosphere; that solar energy then heats up everything that it reaches, but the greenhouse gases then don’t allow the heat to escape. The solar energy passes through the greenhouse gas layer, the thermal energy that’s created is trapped beneath it. That’s why its compared to a greenhouse (or that posh conservatory that you had built a few years ago).

Looking back to the graph, you can see how the concentration of CO₂ has increased by around 50%, with most of that increase happening within the past half-century. I suspect that I’ve played my part in helping that growth; as have many of you reading this.

And so we experience climate change.

To see what climate change looks like, most of us just have to look out of the window. I’m not the only person who’s experiencing:

• more rainfall
• less rainfall
• more storms
• higher temperatures
• lower temperatures
• extreme windy conditions

These climatic effects have agricultural impacts, reducing yields due to

• flooded land
• drought conditions
• extended frost
• changes in growing seasons

We like to talk about mitigating the impact of climate change, but the unsettled consequences of climate change mean that we don’t know what we’re mitigating for. A recent news report informed us that, as a response to UK farmers warning that food production was at risk, the government is discussing additional payments to farmers to counter their likely reduced incomes. It’s a mitigation, for sure – but it doesn’t put food on the table. And you can’t eat money.

OK – that’s set the scene. So what can the lighting industry do to play its part in achieving a livable future for humanity specifically, and for the natural world in general. Oh, and while not forgetting that the human world is part of the natural world., regardless of what some technocrats might choose to believe.

In 2021, CIBSE published TM65 ‘Embodied carbon in building services: a calculation methodology’.

TM65 is a mechanism that focuses on the amount of embedded carbon in a product. Manufacturers have responded very well to the process; not that there is much choice. We only make and sell light fixtures. Those fixtures go into buildings where the rules around embedded carbon are becoming much mor robust. If we want the business, its what we have to do.

The first baby steps towards Net Zero, then, are already in  play. We’re reducing the amount of CO₂ that our manufacturing processes produce.
A good thing. But it’s only the start of the journey, I’m afraid.

What’s not included in TM65 calculations are the CO₂ emissions that come about simply from the business of doing business.
Let me give you an example.

I asked a good friend what his (for it was a ‘he’) annual business mileage was. It turned out that he was driving around 40,000 miles a year. Now, the UK is a small country with lots of settlements and we all know that its next to impossible to trave more than 40 miles in an hour, on average.
My good friend is traveling for 1000 hours every year.
We only have 8760 hours a year to play with, and we like to think that we only work for – what shall we say, busy bees that we are – 50 hours a week. To travel for 1000 hours in a year calls for 20 weeks of that year to be spent sitting on your bum listening to whatever and hoping not to get embarrassed by taking the occasional phone call.

Two things then: half a year is lost and 40,000 miles spent. That’s probably 4000 litres of fuel (–ish).

And for how many meetings? Shall we assume two meetings each day for those 20 weeks. That comes to around 200 meetings – and that’s a lot of meetings!
My argument to him was that a Managing Director should be a damned sight more efficient in the time available. Now that we have the benefit of on-line meetings we can imagine fully half of those meetings taking place at the desk, maybe a home desk, releasing a huge amount of time for more creative thinking, better business . . . and maybe not having to work so hard.

It’s just a thought.

And – no, I haven’t forgotten that the data centres that enable these new practices are greedy beasts. For 2022 its reckoned that data centres accounted for around 1 – 1.3% of global energy demand. So before we get ahead of ourselves, that’s some target for renewable energy systems to achieve.

We’re also a global industry, with most people in it somehow connected to the global supply network of equipment. So many of my friends spend an inordinate amount of their time in the air.

Oh – oh.

We know that business travellers account for only around 12% of all passengers, but those same people account for as much as 75% of airline profits and can emit up to three times more carbon by flying business class than flying economy. And its not just the flight itself. There’s a host of other activity that we need to wrap into business air travel:

• Hotel stays, which account for significant energy and water usage;
• Sustenance, because we gotta eat. But commercial dining causes more waste food and higher food consumption;
• Ground transport, because few of us have our business meetings in the air terminal. Taxis, car rentals and company pick-ups all add to the energy cost of the trip;
• Infrastructure, which is one of those feedback loop items. We travel and we need meeting places, so let’s build expensively accoutred conference facilities;
• Conventions and exhibitions, because, if we’re travelling let’s make maximum advantage of the travel facilities and ask all our friends to join us – in Frankfurt – Milan – Hong Kong – Singapore – Chicago – New York- Sydney.

There must be some way around this. What’s the easiest cheat?

Some people swear by carbon off-setting  – and there are people who just swear at carbon off-setting.

Its time to celebrate neo-simony.

Simony was the act of buying indulgences from the Catholic hierarchy and is often defined as ‘a deliberate intention of buying or selling for a temporal price such things as are spiritual’.
Neo-simony refers to practices undertaken by companies and individuals who wish to appear to be doing the right things by climate change standards, but are, in effect, just paying out for the benefit of not making any difference in their own lives.

Carbon off-setting has not been getting a good press recently. It’s become tied into a commercialised practice of clients paying money for trees to be planted and thereby off-setting their climate emissions. Some of these operators do actually plant trees, and a smaller percentage of those companies actually plant trees that are appropriate to the land that’s being planted.
And some companies do as little as possible, on the grounds that its highly unlikely that any of their clients are going to turn up to see hundreds of acres of saplings in some remote temperate area of the planet. There’s a lot of money to be made in indulgences; it only requires everyone else to look the other way and trust in the Lord.

What we really know.

We achieve the simple net zero target by doing less – by doing as little as possible and being clever to remain profitable while we’re (not) doing it.

We achieve the more complex target of reducing greenhouse gases by engaging in processes that are capable of taking the bad stuff out of the air, and that is not just far-way tree planting.

The World Resources Institute offers six ways to remove CO₂ from the atmosphere:

• Trees and forest: Yes, they need to be there in a real dynamic sense, playing a role in agriculture and livestock management. And not forgetting urban reforestation – please can we have out wooded avenues back;
• Farms and Soils: we have to change our husbandry practices to ensure that billions of acres of open farm land are capable of retaining CO₂ in their structure;
• Biomass carbon removal and storage; is a higher-tech version of relying on trees and forests. Again these processes need proper management to ensure the carbon capture is long-term;
• Direct capture; there re industrial processes, and very much part of the construction sector, where carbon can be held for as long as the material exists;
• Carbon mineralisation; is a process that turns carbon dioxide from a gas to a solid. We don’t really know how to do it at the moment, and it smack of a high energy cost.

Let’s bring it down to the personal, which I’m afraid is something that, ultimately, we will all have to do:

1. My partner and I work from home, so have no daily commute;
2. If we can walk we walk; if we can’t walk, then we cycle;
3. If we’re obliged to use the car then we try to make journeys as efficient as possible. No, its not an EV. We’re not sure which offers the most effective solution – keeping a low-maintenance petrol vehicle with probably another 100,00 miles under the bonnet, or scrapping it and purchasing an EV.
   Besides which, I’m not sure about the medium-long term future of EVs.
4. We holiday within driving distance, though we will take trains and ferries to Europe
5. We’ve recently signed up to Flight Free UK – a commitment not to fly for a year – and beyond, I suppose.
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By the way: that last thing, there. I’m always happy to visit manufacturers wherever they (you) may be in the world – but we’re going to have to find a ground-based way to get me there. Perhaps its time we engaged in some creative thinking about virtual visits to factories and display showrooms!

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The Net Zero conference is being held at 15 Hatfields, London SE1 on Thursday 2^nd May 2024.

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