What I love about the EA community is that no topic is beyond discussion when it comes to making the world a better place.
Before you cast out my post as a time-wasting joke, consider what it would take to breathe a little less? Every once in a while, the thought assigns itself to your head. "I will delay my next breath for a few more seconds than usual." The cost, in time and money, is practically nothing.
But the benefits are indisputable:
- The average breath releases 32mL of CO2 (1)
- Delaying 10 breaths a day saves 320ML of CO2
- If 1 billion people did this every day, that is 320,000 tonnes of CO2 not entering the atmosphere every day
- After a year, that is 116,800,000 tonnes or 0.12 gigatonnes
- For 2021, 36.4 gigatonnes of CO2 were emitted (2). So that is a reduction of 0.3%
- Assuming $100 per tonne to remove CO2, that is a value of $116,800,000,000
So even a laughably minor behavior change, when multiplied by time and people, can produce measurable results. This goes far beyond breathing. Taking half a spoon less of food from a buffet, lowering your monitor brightness just a tad, taking a slightly more efficient route to your destination, skipping a blink once in a while, these actions all require zero cost yet can add up to real impact.
As you read this, you may already have thought about delaying your next breath for a few seconds. Of course, the goal isn't to produce discomfort or a blue face. Every day, we take hundreds of small actions that we could do a little more efficiently. Beyond the environment, you will save time, money, and energy that can go into EA causes when you take free chances to consume fewer resources.
If you object, "My psyche cannot handle consistently questioning every action I do. I do not want to question my own breaths." Then you are right. If real pain is brought about by this, then my argument is worthless. But being a little more efficient once in a while is a far more sane request.
Let me know your thoughts...
Best,
Earn to Give God
(1) https://www.quora.com/How-much-carbon-dioxide-does-the-average-person-exhale-in-a-day
(2) https://www.reuters.com/business/cop/global-carbon-emissions-rebound-near-pre-pandemic-levels-2021-11-04/#:~:text=The%20world%20is%20projected%20to,Global%20Carbon%20Project%20research%20group.
Something seems a little bit off in this cost-benefit analysis to me. You seem to compare the tiny tiny cost of delaying one breath to the sizable accumulated impact of 1 billion people doing this for a year. But that is not really helpful to get an intuition. The tiny tiny cost of delaying breathing once will also accumulate if 1 billion people do this for a year.
Of course, it is still possible that the accumulated cost is lower than the accumulated benefit. But in a way, this whole accumulation does not matter. All that matters is if the cost is higher than the benefit.
Interesting! I guess there would be many small tweaks in daily life such that if we were to adopt them sustainably, they accumulate towards quite sizable impacts. But I guess the difficulties are: (1) their side effects are unknown and could offset the small gains; consequently, (2) fine-tuning those tweaks to just the right amount would be too costly (it's also likely to be heterogeneous across individuals)