The Other Shoe Is Dropping Engineering solutions to over-sized carbon footprints.

• Author: Barbour, Tracy
• Position: ENGINEERING

The carbon-emissions problem has far-reaching ramifications, and it requires everyone working together to address the issue. Earth's climate has always fluctuated, often driven by changes in the atmosphere, but changes observed in recent decades are faster and more extreme than at any recorded time. Human burning of fossil fuels has led to atmospheric greenhouse gas (GHG) concentrations not seen for millions of years, says Francis Wiese, science director of climate solutions at Stantec in Anchorage.

"These high concentrations have led to sharp increases in water and air temperatures across the globe, affecting our natural resources on land, rivers, lakes, and ocean," he says. "This, in turn, is threatening food security, economic safety, and human well-being around the world. Because this is a global crisis, no one person, company, or country can solve this alone; only working together, and everyone doing what they can at all levels simultaneously to reduce their carbon footprint, do we stand a chance to eventually reverse the effects of climate change."

The tern "carbon footprint" refers to the amount of GHG emissions--primarily carbon dioxide--emitted due to the actions and choices of an individual, organization, or nation. Human activities are responsible for almost all the GHG increase in the last 150 years, according to the US Environmental Protection Agency (EPA). The largest source of GHG emissions in the United States is from burning fossil fuels for electricity, heat, and transportation. Carbon dioxide, CO2, accounts for about 80 percent of GHG emissions, with methane, nitrous oxide, and fluorinated gasses contributing the rest. By economic sector, the primary GHG generators are transportation at 27 percent; electricity at 25 percent; industry at 24 percent; commercial and residential at 13 percent; and agriculture at 11 percent, based on the EPA's 2022 Inventory of US Greenhouse Gas Emissions and Sinks: 1990-2020.

"It is critical that we find ways to reduce the carbon intensity [rate of carbon emission] of the economy we have today," says Justin Freeman, Coffman Engineers' vice president of carbon capture, utilization, storage (CCUS) and hydrogen. "We need to identify and Implement ways to not only maintain our quality of life but to improve It. Globally, we need to bring people out of energy poverty, but with a different approach that uses less carbon." Freeman adds that decarbonizailon Is not about demonizing the fossil fuel industry.

Freeman worked at Coffman as a young...