Footprints provide a way to estimate the relative impact of processes and products on the global climate. Including footprint analysis in a course on energy simultaneously provides students with an understanding of this tool and a quantitative guide to approaches that address climate change. College-level classroom activities for (primarily) process-based life cycle carbon footprinting are discussed.
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See supplementary material online for an annotated spreadsheet.
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The radiative forcing of key greenhouse gases is highly variable. For instance, by integrating absorption spectra in the infrared, we see that methane is about 60 times more potent than CO2. But methane chemically breaks down faster in the atmosphere. Over the hundred year period, it is about 28 times more potent than CO2. For more details, see the IPCC report (Ref. 24), Chapter 9 in Ref. 3, and Ref. 6 and 26.
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At its heart, the work is nifty bit of linear algebra that tracks the outputs of one sector of industry with the inputs of other sectors. The method was created by Wassily Leontief, for which he received the Nobel Prize in economics in 1973.
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See Ref. 25 for an approach using an electric kettle to explore energy use and life cycle assessment.
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It is rarely simple to determine whether a product traveled by air. However, stores often include country of origin. Perishable foods that travel far are often air-freighted. For example, fresh blueberries from Peru purchased in the Adirondacks in December will carry a large foorprint due to air travel.
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2023
Author(s)
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