For some time now, ecologists and environmentalists have been promoting life-cycle analyses - calculations of the environmental impact of a product, from the sourcing of materials all the way through to its disposal. While this is still a valid expenditure of effort, our guest today on Sea Change Radio argues that we may need to re-focus more narrowly on the carbon generated at the front-end of an article's life: its production, transportation, delivery, and installation. He asserts that these "upfront carbon" emissions are the more urgent and immediate concerns, and we simply don't have time to focus on the rest of the product's life. This week we welcome back to the show author, environmental journalist, and design expert Lloyd Alter, to discuss his upcoming book, The Story of Upfront Carbon. We learn about the birth of the term, discuss why it's a useful lens for making consumer decisions, and go down a carbon emissions rabbit hole on products like iPhones, electric vehicles, and e-bikes.

00:02 Narrator - This is Sea Change Radio covering the shift to sustainability. I'm Alex Wise.

00:20 Lloyd Alter (LA) - How much is enough? How much do you need to be happy? So put all of this together and I come back to the three words which the whole book is about, which is “use less stuff.”

00:33 Narrator - For some time now, ecologists and environmentalists have been promoting life-cycle analyses - calculations of the environmental impact of a product, from the sourcing of materials all the way through to its disposal. While this is still a valid expenditure of effort, our guest today on Sea Change Radio argues that we may need to re-focus more narrowly on the carbon generated at the front-end of an article's life: its production, transportation, delivery, and installation. He asserts that these "upfront carbon" emissions are the more urgent and immediate concerns, and we simply don't have time to focus on the rest of the product's life. This week we welcome back to the show author, environmental journalist, and design expert Lloyd Alter, to discuss his upcoming book, The Story of Upfront Carbon. We learn about the birth of the term, discuss why it's a useful lens for making consumer decisions, and go down a carbon emissions rabbit hole on products like iPhones, electric vehicles, and e-bikes.

01:51 Alex Wise (AW) - I'm joined now on Sea Change Radio by Lloyd Alter. Lloyd is a lecturer in sustainable design at Toronto Metropolitan University and runs a successful Substack called Carbon Upfront and he's an author and his latest book is called “The Story of Upfront Carbon.” Lloyd, welcome to Sea Change Radio.

02:12 Lloyd Alter (LA) - I'm happy to be here.

02:14 Alex Wise (AW) - So you came up with upfront carbon as a term. It replaced a much less clear term, embodied carbon. Why don't you first explain why this language is important, and then we'll dive into what it means.

02:33 Lloyd Alter (LA) - Well, 20 years ago what they used to talk about was embodied energy which was the energy it took to make something and that kind of made sense, you know, that's the energy that went into it. And when we got worried about carbon rather than energy because we know it's carbon dioxide that's causing the climate change, people started using the term embodied carbon. But it makes no sense. If you look up the dictionary definition of embodied, it means  the carbon isn't in it, the carbon is in the atmosphere. It's not embodied at all. It's the opposite of it. So I was sitting around in a Twitter conversation with an architect from Australia and another one from New Zealand, and we started, you know, the New Zealand architect started saying it should be vomited carbon or spit out carbon or something like that. Then George in Australia said, well, what about up front? And I said up front, carbon that's much better. And I wrote about it and that's basically how it came about. And it's now accepted and used almost everywhere in th...