How Much Greenhouse Gas Does California Swine Produce?

By Alexis Madrigal December 12, 2007 | 8:55:00 AMCategories: Climate, Dataset

A question we often find ourselves asking is just how much raising swine in the great state of California contributes to global warming. Now, with help from the data released by the Air Resources Board, I can definitively tell you that raising swine in this state generated 0.116149133041726 million metric tons of greenhouse gases, the equivalent of burning 1.3 million gallons of gasoline.

The US is balking at capping its greenhouse gas emissions below 1990 levels, but here in California, a law known as AB 32 has done just that. Implementing the policy required that the state do a complete inventory of its GHG emissions from 1990 on, so it could actually determine what the cap should be. That meant calculating the emissions from hundreds of sources from dairy cows to jet fuel to passenger cars.

Here at Wired Science, we figure that you are nerds like us who love data, so we made the ARB spreadsheet a little friendlier, calculated gallons of gas equivalents out of the metric tons of greenhouse gases, and have posted the Excel doc for 2004 in glorious detail here: California Greenhouse Gas Emissions Breakdown. Take a look and find your very own favorite greenhouse gas emissions category.

UPDATE (5:50PM): By popular demand, here's a Google doc of the sheet.

There's also a serious side to seeing this data. My hope is that our readers will get an idea of where, exactly, greenhouse gas emissions are coming from because it's not all passenger cars and factories. Natural gas for heating, oil refining, dairy cows, nitrogen in fertilizer, and dozens of other sources contribute to the greenhouse gases that are causing climate change.

This is discouraging stuff. As this spreadsheet makes clear, many parts of our modern processes are dirty, generating carbon dioxide(CO2), methane(CH4), and nitrous oxide(N2O). But it's also heartening to see this big huge problem -- global warming! -- broken down into categories in a spreadsheet. We can look, line-by-line, at major areas where we can reduce our emissions through efficiency and innovation.

Often, when we think about energy efficiency in a category like homes, we think about its operating efficiency, but it takes a lot of energy (and therefore emissions) to create the house in the first place.

Take manufacturing cement, the 33rd most polluting activity in California. A company called CalStar announced they got $3.4 million last month from Foundation Capital to commercialize their eco-friendly cement. They are a long way from producing enough cement to fulfill demand, but it's a good step towards redesigning the building material system.

Pour the foundation with CalStar cement and then use Serious Materials EcoRock for drywall, and you start to see an ecosystem developing that will allow you to build a green house that generates a lot less greenhouse gases.