
Physico-chemical and economic angles of individual CO2 emissions

How much does a (human) individual on Earth pollute, right now? Eating, travelling, buying, browsing, burping, urinating, sleeping, in short living, none of it is CO2-free. But how big is the burden exactly, per person? Well, homeless people are not quite responsible for their cement… What about our profit, is it another CO2 garbage bin? The complexity of emission calculations is hard to grasp. We lack a gretathunbergian overview, the kind of overview by which we would be able to assess the damages we instill, right now, and to learn to penetrate the promises, and pitfalls, of advertised solutions.
In my first public talk (or perhaps two shorter ones, in succession), I will provide such a picture – large enough to give the summary, yet described with enough microscopic and economic details to bind the pollution to the actual culprits. The picture consists of the physico-chemical mechanisms behind CO2 emissions, linking the atomic perspective to industrial production, but also of economic mechanisms, linking CO2 contributions to money. It can be immediately used.
Earth’s build-up – gases, water and minerals, and their content of oxygen – will be linked to all industrial production processes. You will learn that CO2 is actually the container for oxygen – containing also the one bound in minerals – and what that means to up-scaling of the ‘green’ technologies in capitalistic cycles.
The laws of consumerism will be introduced, which redistribute the CO2 burden differently compared to the current UN agreements. In other words, the ownership of CO2 will be assigned, with potentially significant impacts on society. I will reduce the (message behind) 17 UN goals to a handful. This is a scientific talk adjusted for the intelligent but non-expert audience (with or without PhD), so prepare to learn about basic physical-(geo)chemistry, industrial up-scaling and mechanistic economics. My idea is to inform you, i.e. to raise the level of scientific concepts in your mind, and not to hide them behind common-use, lifeless phrases.
Goran Goranovic
Physicist, physical-chemist, mathematician
Senior researcher, Technical University of Denmark
Lecturer, Niels Brock College