Carbon Neutral or Sustainable

The terms ‘Carbon Neutral’ and ‘Sustainable’ are often found invoked in the same context, but they’re not necessarily compatible: carbon neutrality can be achieved without, or even at the expense of sustainability.

We can achieve carbon neutrality in the medium term by using nuclear power to reduce carbon emissions, but in the long term fuel stocks are not sustainable. Interestingly, in the medium term nuclear waste is a sustainability problem that disappears with a longer view due to natural radioactive decay. When I say long, I really mean long.

Alternative energy sources like wind and tidal power could be thought of as sustainable and carbon neutral. But that’s because we have no idea of the long term effects on atmospheric and oceanic dynamics, or biodiversity as a result of habitat damage. Of course there may be no such problems, however at this point we can’t definitively declare them as truly sustainable, even if we consider their life cycle to be carbon neutral.

Carbon neutrality is measured over a short time frame, usually even less than the life of a product, and is a relatively instantaneous measure of a single factor, it’s just the carbon cycle. Sustainability has no such limitations in scope, to my mind it encompasses all factors over an infinite time frame. So once again it’s a matter of choosing the right scale, with sustainability being much broader and deeper than it’s apparent twin.

Does this make carbon neutrality a convenient and ultimately meaningless political metric, leaving sustainability as the only really important consideration? I suspect that it’s often ignored because it’s too difficult to address, in part because I fear sustainability in any guise is unachievable whilst so many humans inhabit our World.