Can you estimate the order of magnitude of your carbon footprint? How about our remaining carbon budget? Given our current footprint, in how many years will that budget be used up? I‘m a physics student and my fellow physicists often cannot answer such Fermi-style problems. So let‘s take a look together at existing data on carbon emissions. Getting this quantitative grip on the situation is key to solving the often abstractly phrased problem of climate change. Equipped with this improved sense of scale, we can find effective solutions within our local communities as well as put accelerating pressure on governments, global companies and other large-scale actors.

It‘s summer. Summer school time. We‘re in Florence, sitting in front of anti-pasti, stone oven baked pizza and the local specialty, truffle pasta. After a day of lectures, it‘s time to socialize over dinner and get to know the other graduate students attending this summer school on quantum simulation of field theories.

“I was just at Strings in Vienna,“ says J., a young PhD student from the US. He starts recounting the highlights of his trip to the annual gathering of the global string theory research community. It definitely seems like he had a good time, including some beers with many new physics friends and potential future collaborators. 

“Cool! A professor I still know from my physics undergrad at ETH in Zurich was there, too,“ I chime in. “Did you run into him? Prof. Nikas Beisert?“

“Hmm… I don‘t think so. Did he give a talk?“

“No, but he had a poster at the poster session. A rather unusual one. It was entitled “CO₂ Emissions from Theoretical Physics Research?“. He was inviting people to share their thoughts by sticking post-its under some questions he had prepared.“