Eat less meat!

This is an interesting excerpt from the BBC Bloom website about why eating less meat can be hugely beneficial for the environment. And this definitely something we can all do!

Visit here for the full article and have a play around on the rest of the Bloom website because it's very very enlightening.

"A vegan in a 4x4 can do the climate more good than a meat-eater driving a hybrid car. Food for thought?

Livestock produce more greenhouse gases than all the world's transport combined, with beef production singled out by a recent UN report as a particular enemy at the gate. Why? Because cattle belch. Methane is a greenhouse gas more than 20 times worse for climate change than CO2 emissions and cattle are full of it. There are 1.5 billion cattle and buffalo worldwide, each producing more greenhouse gas in a day than the average 4x4.

According to the World Health Organisation, the average Briton eats twice the amount of protein they need in a year. By halving the amount of beef you eat, you could save almost as much CO2 as recycling for a year. By going vegan, you can slice off almost as much CO2 in a year as skipping a single return flight to India.

And cows, sheep, pigs and chickens are responsible for more emissions than just their... well, emissions. So, should we be choosing our meats more carefully?

Together, belched methane from cows and sheep, plus methane from manure, account for about 40% of global methane emissions. But that's not the whole story.

Livestock production also plays a big part in deforestation for grazing and cultivating animal feeds such as soya. Deforestation is currently responsible for a staggering quarter of all global man-made CO2 emissions.

Add to that the fact that manure and fertilisers used to grow crops to feed livestock produce two-thirds of global human emissions of nitrous oxide (a gas almost 300 times as damaging to the climate as CO2 ) and you start to see the scale of the problem.

When you crunch those numbers, a single kilo of beef can be responsible for more greenhouse gas than driving for three hours while leaving all the lights on at home, according to 2007 Japanese research published in the journal Animal Science.

Cows can even offer vegetarians something to ruminate on - a veggie who scoffs a lot of dairy products can actually be as bad for the climate as a meat-eater. That's because the dairy industry accounts for about 23% of UK food emissions.

If the UK went the whole hog and stopped eating meat and dairy entirely, without increasing how much we eat of other foods, we would cut our greenhouse gas emissions by 8%. While this may be an unikely scenario, even eating a bit less could lower demand and reduce emissions significantly."

Zecar - costing 2p a mile!

Are electric cars the way to go in terms of reducing humanity's impact on the environment?

An important point to consider when thinking about such things must be the break-even point i.e. the point at which the amount of carbon emissions you have saved by using electricity overtakes the amount of emissions produced in the manufacture of the vehicle.

Hopefully with an increase in green electricity production surely electric driven cars are going to be a much more sustainable solution to land travel in cars.

A car produced in my native South Wales, the Zecar, now claims to be able to run for 2p for a mile. This is substantially cheaper than that of a petrol car, especially given the current crisis in terms of rising fuel costs. The Zecar costs £15,000 and will go on sale in the UK later this year.

Another benefit of the company is that the cars are manufactured in the UK- thus cutting down on the emissions used on import.

With plans to expand into vans, taxis and limos this company could really help cut greenhouse gas emissions in the future!

Melting Glacier in Norway

One of the difficult things in making a difference to the climate change that our planet is experiencing is breaking things down into chunks that people can handle (hence the name of this blog!). Very often we have a picture of planetary despair painted for us with little or no hints as to how we can help.

This can also be the case with the effects of climate change, with very little physical evidence being given for the changes that are being observed around the planet.

However with more and more attention being paid to climate change this is changing. As this wonderful but distrurbing set of photos shows the dramatic effect of climate change on glaciers in Norway. The difference between the glacier's size in 2001 compared to 2006 is staggering, as seen from the pictures are the beginning and end of this post.

Camden Green Fair 2008

Camden council are running the UK's largest free green event on 1st June in Regent's Park. Running from 12 noon to 7pm it will have speakers forums, science zones and a Mad Hatter's tea party to enjoy whilst delievering the message about how waste, transport, energy, procurement and water affect the environment.

It'll likely be a great way to learn about how we can tackle climate change, with small changes to our lifestyles.

Visit the website at Camden Green Fair for more details.

Food waste in the UK

One of the big problems when faced with such large issues as increased global warming, is being able to break the solutions into bite-size chunks so that the average person can actually begin to make a difference.

A recent study by WRAP - a business focused on reducing waste and boosting recycling, has shown that in the UK a third of all the food we buy ends up in the bin. This generates a total wastage of £10 billion a year.

This food waste obviously has serious consequences in terms of the amount of resources being ploughed into the growing, processing, packaging, transporting, and refrigerating of food, a huge proportion of which are apparently being thrown away.

When converted into a carbon dioxide equivalents it appears that if this waste could be totally eradicated then it would have the effect of taking 1 in 5 cars of the road- a staggering statistic!

It is studies like this that can highlight areas where the average person can make a conscious effort to reduce their waste and with enough people doing so, then we can begin to make a real difference to the climate change that our carbon emissions are causing.

For the WRAP press-release click here and the Love Food Hate Waster campaign can be found here.

Algae Fuel for the future

Debate about the actual benefits of biofuels seems to have been running for a fair while now, with many studies indicating that the effects of clearing such vast swathes of land to produce these supposedly "green fuels" far outweigh the benefits in terms of greenhouse emissions (New York Times article).

There is much concern also on the escalating cost of food around the world, a situation that the production of biofuels does nothing to benefit; demand for ethanol already having caused the price of sugar to double (see BBC article)!

Targets set by the EU and the United States seem to have forced the situation of a rapid increase in biofuel production, without first considering the different techniques and setting standards in the quality of production on a global green scale. Consequently rainforests in Brazil and many other developing countries around the world are being cleared, leading to not only greenhouse emissions from their burning and ploughing but also reducing the amount of carbon sinks globally. A very worrying prospect given how these targets were predominantly set in an attempt to slow carbon emissions.


A technology that I recently heard about (see link) seems like an ingenious new way to use the carbon dioxide emissions from power stations to grow algae; the algae then being converted into biodiesel or ethanol. Testing has apparently been carried out by GreenFuel Technologies which have already demonstrated algae-based fuels powering diesel cars.

Perhaps algae will be a useful source of renewable fuel for the future or maybe not. But it certainly seems a lot more sensible that the apparently hasty shift towards biofuels, which are only serving to destroy the planet quicker in their current remit.

Breathing Earth

For a really interesting simulation on the birth, death and emission rates of humans for the whole planet, check out this site:

Breathing Earth - http://www.breathingearth.net/

It's based on data from the UN and populations as compiled on wikipedia.

This simulation gives us a very good visual guide to each country's contributions to global CO2 emissions. As many of studies are showing now, the emisisons from the USA and China are remarkable and extremely frightening, and this is clearly visible in this animation.

climateprediction.net - Simulating climate change on your computer

http://climateprediction.net/ is a cool experiment akin to the Seti@home project. Making use of the processor of all of its member's computers when they are not being used to their full capacity, simulation models of climate change are run and analysed.

Hopefully this experiment (with the help of many people) will be able to allow us to model how global warming will affect the planet in the future.

Seems like a very worthwhile project and the success seen in the amount of data digested by Seti@home shows that, with similar subscription, could produce some really interesting results.