Pick up your phone and feel the weight. It’s not much; probably not much different than my iPhone 11 Pro, which weighs 188 grams or 6.63 ounces. Apple has designed it to be incredibly efficient and run all day on a small battery, so it takes almost no energy to run. 

The iPhone is a complicated mix of aluminum, carbon, silicon, cobalt, hydrogen, lithium, tantalum, vanadium, and gold. Materials come from the Democratic Republic of the Congo, Indonesia, Brazil, and China. Metallurgist David Michaud told Brian Merchant, author of The One Device, that about 75 pounds of ore were mined to make the phone. Most people could lift that if they had to.

But Apple, one of the few companies to provide the public with a full life cycle analysis showing the carbon emissions of their products, tells us that my phone emits 80 kilograms of carbon dioxide over its lifetime: 13 per cent comes from the electricity for operating the phone, 3 per cent for transportation, and an astonishing 83 per cent from making the phone, the materials that go into it, and the manufacturing. Between manufacture and shipping, 86 per cent of the lifecycle carbon is emitted before you open the box. That’s 68.8 kilograms or about 150 pounds — twice as heavy as the ore mined to make the phone.

Lifting your phone is easy, but imagine if it actually weighed 150 pounds. This is serious weightlifting.

The amount of energy that goes into making a product used to be called “embodied energy,” defined as “the sum of all the energy required to produce any goods or services, considered as if that energy was incorporated or ’embodied’ in the product itself.” However, we are in a climate crisis caused by carbon dioxide, methane, and other greenhouse gas emissions, so instead of measuring embodied energy, we started measuring what became known as “embodied carbon.” But the dictionary definition of embodied is “include or contain (something) as a constituent part.” The carbon is most definitely not a constituent part; it is in the atmosphere. 

In a world where we must reduce and eventually eliminate carbon dioxide emissions, this is important. Before you pick up your phone at the store, those carbon emissions have contributes to climate change. They could be considered “now” emissions, compared to “later” emissions, but they are certainly not embodied emissions.

I thought embodied carbon was a terrible name. In a Twitter discussion with New Zealand architect Elrond Burrell, we tried to come up with a better one; Elrond suggested “burped” or “vomited” carbon to make it obvious that they were a giant cloud of carbon emitted during manufacture. Others suggested “front-loaded emissions.” Jorge Chapas of the Green Building Council in Australia tweeted, “I also wonder how much people dismissing embodied carbon is the way we talk about it. Instead of embodied carbon, perhaps we should consider renaming it as upfront emissions.” I tweeted back, “I think you nailed it!” and added a word, coming up with “Upfront Carbon Emissions.” Writing a year later, author and sustainability provocateur Martin Brown credited me with the coinage:

I may have given it wings, but in all fairness, it was a discussion among Elrond, Jorge, and myself, and “upfront carbon emissions” is now an accepted term. Jorge Chapa and the World Green Building Council were the first to officially use it in a publication titled “Bringing Embodied Carbon Upfront.” Chapa explains why he thinks it is useful:

However, upfront carbon is not strictly the same thing as embodied carbon, as I will explain later. And whether it’s burped, vomited, or just upfront, it is what is going into the air now; it’s what is important now; it’s the 150 pounds of iPhone carbon upfront that matters in the fight against climate change. When you look at the world through the lens of upfront carbon, everything changes.

When Apple did its life cycle analysis, it attributed 13 per­ cent of emissions to the electricity used to charge the phone based on the average American electricity supply, much of which is still made with coal and natural gas and produces significant carbon emissions. However, if you live in Montreal or Vancouver, where your electricity is generated with water power, that 13 percent drops to almost zero, and the upfront carbon increases  as a percentage. The same thing is true if you are driving a Ford F-150 lightning electric pickup truck in Montreal or Oslo where the electricity is low carbon, or you build an all-electric home in Reykjavik: there are no carbon emissions from running the phone, the  car, or the  house-it’s all upfront. As we ramp up renewables and switch to electric vehicles for driving and heat pumps for heating, this leads to what I have called the ironclad rule of upfront carbon:

Everything becomes like your phone with tonnes and tonnes of carbon emissions before you drive the electric car off the lot or step into your new home or unbox a pair of shoes. For products such as your shoes or your sofa, there are no operating emis­sions; they are almost 100 percent upfront carbon, with just a bit ascribed to maintenance and end of life.

This is why what we make and how much we consume becomes as or more important than how much energy it takes to operate. This is why sufficiency, or making and buying just what we need, has become as important as efficiency. This is why when you look at the world through the lens of upfront carbon, everything changes.

“Embodied carbon” is doubly confusing because not only is it not embodied, it is not even carbon. Our problem is carbon dioxide, which forms when we burn carbon to generate heat, which happens when a carbon molecule has an exothermic reaction with two molecules of oxygen to make carbon dioxide. So, burning a one-kilogram lump of coal actually has about 3.67 kilograms (8 pounds) of upfront carbon emissions because of the weight of the oxygen.

We also talk about carbon dioxide equivalents (CO2e), mea­suring the impact of methane or refrigerants in terms of their effectiveness as greenhouse gases compared to CO2. It’s messy because they are not really equivalent; methane, for example, decomposes in about twenty years, whereas CO2 stays up in the atmosphere. But for convenience and brevity, when we say carbon, we mean CO2 or CO2e, even though what we call carbon is 3.67 times the weight of (solid) carbon.

The Story of Upfront Carbon: How a Life of Just Enough Offers a Way Out of the Climate Crisis, by Lloyd Alter, is available now via New Society Publishers and wherever books are sold.