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https://www.politico.com/news/magazine/2023/09/03/ukraine-russia-invasion-carbon-footprint-00111652>
"Day after day, Lennard de Klerk’s home in Hungary’s sleepy countryside was
filling up with Ukrainian refugees, their haggard expressions putting a literal
face on the tragedy unraveling just a country away. It was March 2022, just a
few weeks after Russia invaded their homeland, and de Klerk was troubled.
Seeking a quiet place to think, the 50-year-old Dutch carbon
expert-turned-hotelier went to swim laps in a municipal pool. “What more can I
do to help Ukraine?” he asked himself. Between two strokes, an idea he liked
flashed into his head: “Why don’t we calculate the carbon impacts of this war?”
Putting a figure on the carbon emissions tied to Russia’s invasion might help
people outside of Ukraine understand the massive stakes of the conflict and
care more about it. “The human tragedy is constrained to the territory of
Ukraine,” he recalls thinking. “Carbon emissions are a different story; they
impact everyone’s climate.”
But doing that would be no small job. Tallying an ongoing conflict’s emissions
had never been done before. In fact, calculating the emissions of an entire war
had been done only once — by advocates critical of fossil fuels who estimated
emissions of the 1991 Gulf War. That war lasted less than six months and the
calculations were done nearly two decades after the conflict had ended.
Still, de Klerk was not deterred. In a previous life, during which he had
worked as a respected expert in greenhouse gas measurement, he had learned that
with a bit of accounting magic, the carbon emissions of almost anything can be
counted. Doing so was his hammer — the versatile tool he applied generously to
myriad problems for much of his life. He had helped the Netherlands source in
Ukraine some of the 100 million metric tons of carbon dioxide it purchased as
offsets from foreign governments in the early 2000s, eventually running a
50-employee company dedicated to such services. When he and his husband,
Jeroen, purchased a dilapidated Hungarian mansion to set up the carbon-neutral
ecolodge they now run in the town of Irota, population 59, he started computing
its emissions. (Negative 1,744 kilograms of carbon dioxide annually last he
checked.) Ditto for a Budapest apartment he rents out. And his household.
So he messaged a handful of former colleagues, including Ukrainian climate
expert Olga Gassan-zade, to enlist their support. “Do you know what the default
emission factor of a cruise missile is?” he asked her. When replaying that
exchange over drinks in June, Gassan-zade exploded in laughter as she recalled
the timing of his outreach. “We had been out of touch for 10 years — and then
there was war,” she teased. But she was on board: “Then you knew who your
friends were,” she quipped.
The friends got to work tabulating and calculating the excess carbon emissions
caused by the war. Their initiative is the most prominent among a number of
efforts that are measuring the greenhouse gases of the conflict in Ukraine and
challenging previous notions of what constitutes an injury of war."
Cheers,
*** Xanni ***
--
mailto:xanni@xanadu.net Andrew Pam
http://xanadu.com.au/ Chief Scientist, Xanadu
https://glasswings.com.au/ Partner, Glass Wings
https://sericyb.com.au/ Manager, Serious Cybernetics
