CLIMATE EMERGENCY DIARIES #2
The Climate fight is not over
Everything is connected and the time for real action is now
Due to the lockdown that is going on basically everywhere in the world, emissions are lowering quite fast. We all have seen satellite images coming from China, Italy, Spain, USA, showing how the local air quality have improved in a very short time while we are forced to stay at home.
As we keep our cars parked and most of the companies are closed, emissions are halted. But we cannot think that this will continue for long. We need to get back to work in order to save our economies and we need to go back to a life as normal as it gets, if we are to save our mental sanity.
But we need also to understand that everything is connected. Our economy, the environment and this sanitary crisis, are all part of the same problem. The development model we have used since the Industrial Revolution, is no more sustainable. We need to change. And there is no “better” moment to do it. There will never been a better time to change, and it is an opportunity that we cannot waste.
Yes, we need to pump a lot of money into our economies, is order to save jobs. But we need also to carefully consider to who we are giving the money, in what we want to invest for our future. As we try to save jobs with a short term view, we need to also have a vision for our long term future.
There are many sectors of our current economy which are not going to survive to this crisis. We need to admit this to ourselves, and we need to move on. For the first time in our lives, we can truly make decisions about our future, we can decide what we want to achieve as humans.
Capitalism is based on the assumption of a endless consumption of goods, resources, ecosystems and the planet itself. I think right now we are finally discovering that many things we strived for, are not essential to our well being. We buy so many things, which does not give us real happiness, nor any freedom. And in order to afford those things, we have to commit our own life, our time, the only thing that nobody can give us back, in endless days spent trying to produce many other useless things.
History will judge us. But I would bet my money on the fact that in the future they will define us as the most crazy form of civilization that was ever inhabitating earth. We are all prey to collective madness.
The IPCC have warned us in last reports about the impacts that a global warming of 1,5°C or more above pre-industrial levels would have, and have defined what the global response should be in order to avoid this to happen. The virus might have bought us some additional time, as global emissions will surely go down this year, due to lockdowns and recession. But the problems didn’t magically evaporate, they are still there. This Virus is a wake up call, a sound message from nature, telling us we need to wake up now and we finally need to evolve to our full potential.
But how we do this? What I wrote so far sounds all good, but how do we actually do this? Here a few ideas.
Energy
It is time to invest massively into the renewable sources. The Sun is giving us energy for free every day, every minute, every second. It is time to harvest this energy for real. As it is time to stop investing into fossil fuels. With consumption down to zero and oil prices even below zero, many companies in the field will be swept away and governments should most probabily bail them out. It is fine to do it to save jobs and workers, but if we have to use people money, let’s direct investment to new sources, and only to renewables and sustainable forms. Distributed production and accumulation will need to be incentivized. We have the technologies to do it, we have the resources available, so let’s just do it. Excuses no longer holds.
Transports
Airline companies will suffer a big blow. The time for low-cost air travel could be gone forever. Flying will become more expensive, and it will be worth only for long distances. There will probably not be so much difference anymore between business and economy class, as the social distancing will require for more space between sits. Many planes, to maximize return on fuel, will also be bigger and half cargo and half passenger.
For shorter distances, train will be king. It was already starting to make sense before the virus, also from environmental point of view. It will make so much more sense from now on. And for trains, it is also easier to plan long time investments into the infrastructure. Macro Areas of the World, such as Europe, could develop their own bullet train net, and decide to power them only with energy coming from European Sustainable Energy. Same goes for USA, Asia and the rest of the world.
How about cars? We already know a big change from petrol car to electric car is on the way, and so is the change to autonomous vehicles. At the same time, the total automotive market will probably shrink down, as the general spending power of population will be reduced by recession. Big automotive groups will need to consolidate and merge to live. We will have also to consider the real advantage, as individual, in changing cars every few years like we do now. With recession coming many people will have to change car less often. From environmental point of view, we should also address the real pros and cons in changing to new models. The reduction in pollution/km is evident, while the production environmental cost is not so clear, and so far we never considered it, but we will have to. It could be better for the planet retrofit an existing car, that to produce a new one, therefore also creating a new kind of market. Finally, with autonomous electric car coming, will it still make sense to own a car?
Food Production and Dietary Choices
We need to start looking into what we eat, how we produced it, and how we distribute it.
- Reduction of food waste:1/3 of all food grown or bred, does not arrive on the plate to be consumed, but goes wasted before. Food waste contributes about 8% of total human-generated emissions.
- Plant Based Diet: the most conservative estimates say that animal breeding is responsible for at least 15% of emissions. Including indirect emissions due to things like deforestation, transport, water consumption and more, we arrive to up to 50% of all human-related emissions! Furthermore, overconsumption of protein is increasingly indicated as negative for health. Proteins necessary for our body to function properly are far inferior to those we eat on average. This consumption is directly linked to the occurring of various types of cancer, cardiovascular problems and so on. It is not necessary to become vegetarian or vegan, but it is certainly necessary to reduce the consumption of meat. A good starting point is simply to pay attention to how many times a week we eat it, and then try to reduce its consumption in a conscious way. This could be the most easy and significant action every individual can take to curb emission.
- Packaging. We are a Plastic Planet, especially when it comes to packaging. According to an OECD report, 96% of the plastic produced to be used as packaging becomes waste within a year of life. 47% of all plastic waste produced annually is due to packaging. We must demand food and industrial packaging to be drastically re-designed and new rules to get enforced. But as consumers, we must try to discard all packaged products as much as possible, and within packaged products, we should prefer those that use glass, paper and aluminum, products for which recycling and reuse rates are far superior, and which cause less environmental problems and less energy consumption.
Work, Industrial production and Logistic
Production will probably relocated next to the selling market, as a result of a general contraction of demand, and in order to keep production costs down, big investment in automation will be necessary. Required jobs will be more and more qualified.
Also, Smart Working will be more and more used and it will both help to reduce pollution and social costs, and increase productivity.
I just outlined a few ideas here, but many more have already been developed. If you want to find at least a hundred of them, good for both Economy and the Environment, and ready to be used already today, you can start for example from the Project Drawdown. There is much work to do but we do not even need to invent anything to arrive to a better place because all technologies are here, we just need to decide to stop procrastinating and use them for real.