This week, I managed to get no further than one minute and 25 seconds into this week’s episode of This Week (is that enough “this weeks”?), before Andrew Neil had me back on the BBC’s complaints site.
I’m currently reading Simon L. Lewis and Mark A. Maslin’s The Human Planet: How We Created the Anthropocene. In the first couple of chapters, the authors lay down some history of the human interpretation of climate change. I find it mind-blowing that we understood our ability to affect this planet’s climate through our activities, and that we were discussing it, more than 200 years ago. Geologists like Thomas Jenkyn and enlightenment giant, George-Louis Leclerc (better known as the Comte de Buffon) both wrote and gave lectures on the topic.
Continue reading “The Human Planet: How We Created the Anthropocene”
Over the past six months, I’ve become increasingly interested in the topic of web sustainability. The carbon footprint of the Internet was not something I used to give much thought to, which is surprising considering my interest in environmental issues and the fact that my profession is web-based.
Today marks the opening of the Kongernes Nordsjælland (Kings of North Zealand) National Park, comprising 5,000sq km of forest and 60sq km of lakes as well as a number of UNESCO World Heritage Sites.
Continue reading “Reason to be cheerful: Denmark gets a new national park today”
“Please think about the environment before printing this email.” It’s a request many of us are probably familiar with. It seems reasonable, but it also implies that an email, and by association the web, is a green medium. Sadly, this isn’t exactly true. What if I told you that the Internet is the largest coal-fired machine in the world?
I’ve received the link to download my copy of Jeremy Keith’s Going Offline, very much looking forward to getting stuck in!
Found via Yanis Varoufakis’ blog.
Before going any further here, I want to make it clear that I’m well aware of the shortcomings of carbon offsetting, wonderfully satirised by the folks behind Cheat Neutral. However, carbon offsetting is undeniably better than doing nothing. And as sustainable as you might try to be, it probably isn’t enough. The World Resources Institute have calculated that we should be aiming for a maximum limit of two tons of CO₂ emissions per person, per year. And yet it is calculated that the average EU citizen incurs 9.1 tons of CO₂ emissions. The average US citizen emits about twice as much as this.