Author: Kiersten Sundell
What’s the difference between lifecycle emissions and …. regular emissions?
Well, to tell you the truth, there is no zero-carbon energy source in existence. Bombshell.
We often use the term “zero-carbon” to describe clean energy sources like nuclear, solar, wind, and hydro, because they don’t emit any carbon dioxide into the atmosphere while producing energy. The building and mining processes are not carbon neutral, however. Fossil fuels make all of that possible, at least for the foreseeable future.
Lifecycle emissions consider all carbon emitted from “cradle-to-grave,” or the first step of materials manufacturing, until the very last moment of decommissioning. They’re important because they allow you to accurately compare the climate cost of different energy sources, even when all of them just appear “clean.”
We’ve all thought, “Hey, maybe I’ll do the environmentally friendly thing today and bike to the store for groceries!” While that’s awesome, we tend to forget that every item we purchase had to take its own diesel-powered trip to the store from a faraway farm, as did the seeds and fertilizer that helped produce the food. And that fertilizer? It required a carbon-intensive chemical process with natural gas as a feedstock, which was drilled for by more fossil-burning equipment. It can be a rabbit hole, and scientists do life cycle assessments (LCAs) like these all the time.
Nuclear energy has one of the lowest lifecycle emissions of any energy source — about 6.4 grams of CO2 equivalent per kilowatt-hour, according to the IPCC. Wind is close by at around 11 grams, and solar can range from 8–84 grams. Coal breaks the scale at upwards of 1000 grams per kilowatt-hour!
And we wonder why so many people die from air-pollution-induced respiratory cancers.
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