A Fair Share

Global warming looms large, and seems beyond the ken of any one person to affect, while the notion that simply driving less or changing other habits could be of any real use seems to make a mockery of the enormity of the problem. However, a rigorous quantification of consumption shows that, far from a triviality, it is ultimately individual-level consumption that drives nearly all US carbon emissions, with the greater share due to those three basic things everyone does every day: get around (personal transportation), directly use energy (heating, cooling, lighting, etc.), and eating, all things one has direct control over day by day. The focus of this text is to rigorously quantify how all these behaviors drive global warming, and how they can reasonably be altered at the individual scale in meaningful ways. Furthermore, while hopefully accessible to a general audience, the text is meant to be scientifically rigorous, and so the mathematics and methods are not hidden from the reader's eyes.

Introduction and Background