What is a carbon hotspot?

For a few years now, I’ve been thinking about the idea of ‘carbon hotspots’. I define a carbon hotspot as a physical or cultural zone that is responsible for an unusually intense concentration of greenhouse gas (carbon) emissions. I think the concept is useful for helping us to think about the nature of the physical and cultural transformation our societies need to make to respond to climate change.

I first recall using the term back in 2007 when putting together an unsuccessful grant application with several colleagues from diverse disciplines at the University of Technology Sydney. Back then, we were thinking of carbon hotspots in a purely physical sense – as geographic sites where activities occur that generate a lot of greenhouse gas emissions.

Physical carbon hotspots

Physical sites at which there is intense generation of greenhouse gas emissions include coal-fired power stations, coal mines, major motorways, airports, industrial facilities and sites of major deforestation. These are carbon hotspots at a project or infrastructure scale.

The Loy Yang Power Station in Victoria’s Latrobe Valley is a good example. This is the site of Australia’s largest coal-fired power station. The Loy Yang A facility, owned by AGL, emits a whopping 18.5 megatons of greenhouse gas per annum. Next door, Loy Yang B, owned by GDF Suez Australia and Mitsui emits another 8.3 megatons of greenhouse gas. The twin power stations consume brown coal from the adjacent Loy Yang Mine. Together, these power stations are responsible for almost 5% of Australia’s total greenhouse gas emissions. The physical site at Loy Yang easily fits my definition above of a carbon hotspot.

Physical carbon hotspots are perhaps most obvious at the scale of a piece of infrastructure, but there are other scales at which the concept can be useful. Scaling up, we can define cities as carbon hotspots relative to rural areas. Cities are intense concentrations of the daily activities that generate greenhouse gas emissions. We generate a lot of greenhouse gases to keep our buildings running and run our transport systems. Particular cities might be sites of more intense greenhouse gas emissions – they are hotter hotspots – but all cities are carbon hotspots relative to the less densely occupied landscapes between cities.

Scaling up still further, we could identify particular nation states as carbon hotspots – countries like Australia, Canada and the United States where emissions per person are well above the global average. Australia emits about 30 tonnes of greenhouse gas per person each year, whereas China emits less than 8 tonnes per person and India emits about 2.3 tonnes per person. Australia is a carbon hotspot in this sense.

If we reduce the scale, we could identify particular suburbs, streets, or even households as carbon hotspots. Back in 2007, the Australian Conservation Foundation produced a Consumption Atlas that showed household levels of greenhouse emissions on a suburb by suburb basis. Although out of date now, this report identified suburbs with particularly high levels of greenhouse gas emissions – suburbs straddling the harbour in inner Sydney and the banks of the Brisbane River in Brisbane. These wealthier suburbs can also be defined as carbon hotspots.

Cultural carbon hotspots

Physical carbon hotspots are fairly easy to identify and we can use data to back up the idea that certain places emit more greenhouse gases than others. Identifying cultural carbon hotspots is a more subjective task, but an equally important one if you believe that social and cultural change is needed to tackle climate change. I would argue that we have collective cultural commitments that are also responsible for large concentrations of greenhouse gas emissions.

One of the most obvious of these is our global commitment to unfettered growth in consumption, with all the resultant greenhouse gas emissions. Consumption is the engine of growth in gross domestic product (GDP) and GDP growth reigns supreme as the goal of economic policy around the world. Never mind that this consumption generates negative environmental impacts – these are externalities, and they are not counted. Never mind that growth in GDP does not increase happiness above a certain minimum level. Indeed, the endless growth puts us all on a treadmill of trying to keep up which arguably undermines our wellbeing. Our cultural commitment to GDP growth is a cultural carbon hotspot that requires transformation if we are to move towards and beyond sustainability.

Another cultural carbon hotspot is our media and entertainment industry, which distracts and pacifies us, while ignoring or downplaying the big sustainability challenges of our time. Our media culture creates doubt over climate science by portraying all discussion about climate change as conflict. It offers little space for informed discussion and deliberation about climate change, preferring to feed the 24-hour news cycle with the latest sensation. In Australia, the dominance of a Murdoch press that is antagonistic to climate change response means that few Australians have access to diverse voices on climate change. Our media culture is another kind of cultural carbon hotspot. While not directly responsible for large quantities of emissions, it nevertheless holds back the task of emission reduction substantially.

So what?

I find the concept of carbon hotspots useful for several reasons. First, I see carbon hotspots as pressure points where we can start to think about and experiment with the changes needed to transform towards a sustainable human civilisation. Reimagining carbon hotspots as physical and cultural sites that are no longer responsible for greenhouse gas emissions has both symbolic and practical value. What would a site like Loy Yang look like if it was redeveloped as a solar power station, or wind turbine manufacturing facility? What do our cities look like when they absorb greenhouse gas emissions instead of generate them? What economic models and indicators can serve us better in a sustainable future? And how can the media become a positive force in the transformation towards a sustainable world? These questions can start to generate practical actions that we can take right now.

Second, carbon hotspots help to make the amorphous challenge of climate change more tangible. They point us to the physical and cultural sites that need to change. It can sometimes feel like beating climate change means transforming everything, but the sites of transformation are actually more limited and that makes the job feel more manageable. It gives us a place to start and a site we can point to. The value of such an approach has become very evident with the rise of the fossil fuel divestment movement, which encourages investors to withdraw their support for companies and sites that are committed to fossil fuels. Physical carbon hotspots have become sites of protest, as we have seen with protests held at coal mines, power stations, and even in the banks that invest in these hotspots.

Finally, the idea that carbon hotspots are both physical and cultural is a reminder that social and cultural change needs to be part of our response to climate change. It is tempting to think that technology will solve everything and we can go on living our lives as normal, but I don’t think this is the case. Even if we could beat climate change with purely technological fixes, we would be left with huge problems of social justice and inequity that are associated with high consumption levels in the rich world. Tackling these big social and cultural challenges is certainly part of our journey towards thriving on this planet, and probably necessary to beat climate change.

I’m planning to write more about carbon hotspots this year, perhaps focusing in on some specific examples and how we might start the process of reimagining these physical and cultural sites. If you have examples of carbon hotspots that you would like to discuss, please drop me a line in the comments below.

Credits: Image of Loy Yang Power Station by Greenstone Girl, unaltered, used under Creative Commons licence.