The Broken Pill Vol.1

- Greta Thunberg’s Book-

-INTRODUCTION-

On 15^th Feb 2023 Jordan Peterson made the following tweet in regards to Greta Thunberg’s promotion of her book.

Dr Jordan B Peterson @jordanbpeterson

What's the carbon footprint of the book, dearie? Or is what you're doing so important that such niceties simply don't apply?

Greta Thunberg @GretaThunberg

I’m so pleased to share that The Climate Book is now available in the USA and Canada! I have gathered the wisdom of over one hundred contributors to highlight the many different crises we face and equip us with the knowledge we need to avoid a climate disaster. 1/2 https://t.co/z2AD32Oac1

A few hours later I posted the following, much to the dismay of Greta’s fans.

Prospector @NewsProspector

@jordanbpeterson The amount of carbon used to harvest the materials to mass produce that book and get to where it needs to go, is more than the average person will ever use in their lifetime. She has no moral high ground and no argument.

There were a myriad of responses, ranging from hate, to telling me I am wrong, and some even accusing me of hating books.

Only one reply tried to tackle my claim about the carbon used and it failed.

Catherine Marshall @zizzyballord

@NewsProspector @jordanbpeterson "A typical paperback book has a climate impact similar to that of watching 6 hours of TV, at around 1 kilogram of carbon dioxide equivalent (CO2e)."

newscientist.comIs it better for the planet to read online or in a paper format?The author of How Bad Are Bananas? reveals the surprising facts about the carbon footprint of our reading matter

The failure is that it does not take into account the mass production of a book, which is the metric I used in my tweet, it only focuses on a single unit, it also gives the metric for a paperback book, which to my knowledge is at the time of me writing this unavailable for Greta’s book.

So to see just how much damage Greta is doing with the mass production of this hardcover book, I’ll address the specifics here rather than on Twitter, here I am free of constraints and can layout all the information needed.

-The Hardcover Book-

So the first thing we will need to know, is the dimensions of the hardcover book.

The book is 247mm x 43mm x 185mm, has 464 pages, and according to the publisher Penguin Publishing has the weight of 1380g or 1.38kg.

Also on the Penguin Publishing site is the average CO2e calculation for hardcover books:

Depending on the study, the average book has a carbon footprint of around 2 kgCO2e per kilogram of weight.

Taking all this information into account we can now find out the CO2e footprint of each book created according to the publisher.

50g of weight = 100g of CO2e

100g of weight = 200g of CO2e

500g of weight = 1kg of CO2e

1kg of weight = 2kg of CO2e

So at 1.38kg of weight the CO2e per book is just over 2.7kg, this is the CO2e footprint every time one of her hardcover books is created.

Just a side note here, I did run the dimensions of the book through ChatGPT for it to calculate the CO2e and this was the result below.

So if you think the estimation of 2.7kg CO2e per book is low, then you are probably right, but I will be using the information the publisher has supplied as we don’t know the exact process this book will go through to be created.

-Per capita emissions-

The most recent data I could find for the per capita CO2e from Canada and the USA, where she announced the book would be released in her tweet, are from The World Bank and from 2019 pre pandemic, it’s important to take the data from before or after the pandemic and there was disruptions that may skew the data one way or another during the pandemic.

So in 2019 The World Bank lists Canadas yearly per capita emissions as 15.4t.

Also in 2019 The World Bank has the USA’s yearly per capita emissions at 14.7t. This is the most recent pre pandemic data on the site at the posting of this article.

Now assuming the average Canadian and American lives to 80 years of age and the per capita yearly emissions don’t fall over that 80 year period (they will as it’s being forced in that direction, but we work with what we have), then we can simply multiply the per capita tonnage of Canada by 80 and the per capita tonnage of the USA by 80 to get our lifetime values.

So the lifetime per capita value for someone who lived to be 80 in Canada would be 1,232t and similarly the lifetime value for the USA would be 1,176t.

-The Book vs The Humans-

Next we need to find out how many books made would have the equivalent emissions to someone living to 80 years old in Canada and the USA.

At 2.7kg CO2e per book, multiplied by 456,500 books we get 1,232t of CO2e.

So she would need to create over 456,500 books to exceed in the CO2e from a Canadian citizen who lived to 80 years old if they consistently emitted 15.4t per year.

In the USA she’d need to create 435,900 books, which would be 1,176t to reach the 1,176t per capita limit.

-Conclusion-

So even though these are just estimates as the real figures cannot be known due to the complexity of the process, my tweet is accurate, there is no way she will create less than one million hardcover books total and the fact that there is no paperback version available as of the time of this post makes things even worse.

The paperback version would cause less emissions and would have been the better option, further to this as far as I can see from the information available the paper in this book is not recycled.

Her previous book Greta and the Giants was printed on recycled paper and that is noted in the listing for the book on Amazon, for her new book there is no such disclaimer on the Amazon listing or on the publishers webpage for the book, which means unless that information is being withheld, trees are being cut down due to this books creation.

Someone (imo) is not practicing what they preach.