Cycling less

I didn't actually cycle the morning after my last post on this topic, but I did cycle on Wednesday and Thursday, so I'm making progress. Don't tell ANYONE that I am this sad, but I have been keeping track of my morals and here's one in graphical form:



There are so many good excuses for not cycling... being tired, wind, having a broken bike, snow, being late, need to drive around during work hours, not remembering whether I'm going to need to drive around during work hours, rain, need to drive after work. And the list gets bigger the longer I have the car. I can have excuses every day!! This didn't happen before I had a car!

The End of Morals

Leaving University and moving to The North has done nothing good for my morals.

Particularly environmental ones. In the last year, I have started eating more meat, started printing e-mails, flown all round the world (particularly on my trip to America and Barbados) and bought a car.

I really bought the car with good intentions. I was only going to use it when cycling, walking, trains and buses weren't good enough to get where I wanted to go. In the end though, I have been using the car a lot of the time and have hardly cycled to work at all this year, getting worse and worse. Now I have got my bike fixed, I need to use it. But I'm not sure if I have the willpower. I suppose I'll find out tomorrow motning...

Advice #29

Try not to use electricity between 4 and 6.30pm on weekdays. The peak in demand at this time means that we often over-produce electricity in the rest of the day and night (it's hard to turn off most power stations for only a few hours), wasting electricity. If we cut our demand at this time of day (even if we used it at other times instead), we could probably produce electricity more efficiently and have less wastage in the system, saving money and the environment

How to eat responsibly

I have wondered and wondered how best to eat in an environmentally responsible way. I have asked environmentalists, vegetarians, vegans and scientists, and nobody has an answer on which foods are better than others, or how you should choose which food has the smallest carbon footprint. Now the New Scientist has the answer!

I advise you all to get the New Scientist dated 13th September 2008 and read the cover story.

This is a wonderful article. It's full of debate about what we know and what we don't know about carbon footprints. It's full of warnings that you cannot take the carbon footprint of chicken A and then assume it will have the same footprint as chicken B who lives on a different farm. But it also gives some guidelines about food.

Is it better to be a vegetarian?
Is it much much better to be a vegan?
How about buying things from the other side of the world?
Or organic food?

Now we have a few answers, although the scientific knowledge is not yet complete. Red meat and dairy products are the worst. Then chicken, eggs and fish. And fruit and vegetables are the best.

In the US, 11% of the carbon equivalent emitted is for transport.
A quarter of greenhouse gas emissions are actually nitrous oxide, from fertilisers.
In America, emissions from driving are only half of those from food production.
The emissions from fish depends hugely on how they are caught or farmed, and on whether they are carnivorous or herbivorous.

Anyway, don't trust me on all this. The discussion is much more complete in the New Scientist itself. This is something we all need to know. Giving up on plastic bags is NOTHING compared to knowing about stuff like this.

Aside:
Of course, carbon footprint is only a small amount of what constitutes sustainability, as a wonderful university lecturer called Big Rob told us. If we eat all the herbivorous fish, that's not sustainable and if we don't trade fairly with the third world, that's not sustainable either. But global warming is important and this is information that I have found very hard to uncover until now

Not such negative thoughts

Much has been made of the loss of confidence and pessimism that is sweeping the world. We are apparently heading towards a recession to the extent that it is very unlikely that we will avoid it now. I haven't heard the speech but apparently Alistair Darling (the chancellor) has now come out and explained that he is extremely worried about it. But while people feel out of control and pessimistic about the world's financial situation, a more positive attitude is sweeping the country. People are starting to believe that they can make the world a better place. And they are believing it more than they have in the last twenty years.

The nineties was an apathetic decade. It was comfortable, and people felt that things could continue how they were. It's only been in the last few years that people have discussed global warming, poverty and the environment as anything more than abstract ideas. After years of campaigning, plastic bags are actually being phased out. This is not happening from government pressure, but through normal people using cloth bags for their shopping instead of getting plastic ones. Almost all councils in England now collect recyclable waste separately from other waste, whereas almost none did until very recently. Make poverty history was a campaign that encouraged people to consider the possibility that poverty may not exist at some time in the future. That's an extremely idealistic proposition, but millions of people bought into the idea with things like their branded wristbands. Bill Bryson even managed to get a prime-time TV slot in which he moaned about litter for an entire episode of panorama. It didn't make great TV but it was a sign that people really think things like this are important.

I listened to a talk the other day, given by Eugenie Harvey. She is the force behind the company which produced "Change the World For a Fiver", which is called We Are What We Do. Her idea is that small actions carried out by many people can have a big effect and actually change the world. Her ideas include unplugging mobile chargers and remembering people's names to make them feel more important. Her ideas are fantastic, but even more impressive is that she began the company and created a stir from absolutely nothing. More and more people are thinking like her. They don't simply believe that change can happen, they believe that they can help to produce the change.

More about me and the environment

I am fiercely independent. If someone tells me to do something I get defensive; I don't automatically do the opposite, but I certainly have a good look at the options to see whether it would work to do something else. I want to be absolutely sure that I am my own person. And I do it obsessively. When someone says they can predict how I'll react to something or what I'll say, it throws me into a kind of panic and I don't know what to do. I cast about for new ways of being unpredictable. I don't want to be weird, but I certainly do want to decide things myself and I pride myself on having original ideas and new ways of doing things.

It's perhaps because of this that I am a man of short term obsessions. I have had my hatred of umbrellas, my love of cheese, my love of the cardigans, my love of tea, my obsession with cacti, and many more. When someone finds me out, or, worse, is more obsessed than me, it shocks me and I flee in panic!

But slightly contradictorily, I like to take up the same opinions as my Dad. You could probably say that the time when I was gaining all my background of opinions and way of thinking was a time when I listened a lot to my Dad. He was a Quaker, he was slightly anti-establishment, he was an environmentalist and a scientist. Everyone has beliefs and values that are unquestioned, and these are some things that are firmly ingrained in me.

A wonderful thing about university is that there are a lot of people with carefully considered opinions. I don't discuss life, the universe and everything too often, but certainly over a few years you get through most things. So you start to question your ingrained values. That's important to me, because then I get to be that little bit more independent in my thoughts.

I realised only recently that environmentalism was something that I should question too. My Dad died before everyone believed in global warming, so I can't just steal his ideas on that. It brings up lots of problems that he probably thought through but I just accepted.
What kind of world are we trying to save?
Do we want to stop seas from being filled with fertilisers that kill off local fish populations?
Do we mind that a land filled with people, our houses, infrastructure and agriculture is unnatural?
Is the destruction of sea habitat somehow more important or more avoidable than the destruction of habitats on land?
Is biodiversity very very important? It's not so natural either. After all, if you leave land to do its own thing, nettles could cover it and squeeze out anything else. Or bracken in the highlands.
If we will be able to survive the problems of global warming, is that enough?
In terms of importance, if you give a human life a value of 10, what's the value of a frog?
If there is a huge swarm of insects is it more justified to kill them rather than a lone bug?
Can we even define the state of the Earth environmentally?

I'm not planning on abandoning my environmental views, because I think they are important. But it's something to think about, because unquestioned views are dangerous no matter who you are.

Engineering challenges of our time

It's been well-publicised in the last day or two, but here are the top 14 challenges facing engineers at the present according to the National Academy of Engineering:

• Make solar energy affordable


• Provide energy from fusion


• Develop carbon sequestration


• Manage the nitrogen cycle


• Provide access to clean water


• Reverse engineer the brain


• Prevent nuclear terror


• Secure cyberspace


• Enhance virtual reality


• Improve urban infrastructure


• Advance health informatics


• Engineer better medicines


• Advance personalised learning


• Explore natural frontiers

It really got me thinking, what were the challenges 50 years ago, or a hundred years ago, or a thousand years ago? What will they be in a hundred years? Well, even fifty years ago, almost none of these would be on the list. Of course, explore natural frontiers would still be there along with prevent nuclear war (not so much "terror" back then, people did not understand the meaning of the word terror: they were simply aware of a danger in a dignified and undoubtably British way)

Fifty years ago there were no mobile phones or personal computers, few people used aircraft or owned televisions, especially colour ones. The cassette tape, now worthless, was not yet in mass production. Smallpox still existed and the MMR vaccine had not even been invented. As I write, more and more things come into my head, some technical, some not. The world has changed hugely in the last fifty years; in terms of technology as much as by any other measure. And that's within many people's lifetimes, it's no wonder old people can get a bit bewildered by new-fangled things.

In fifty years' time, the world is likely to change a whole lot more. In my opinion, the main danger is the damage we do to the world as the other 5 billion people catch up with the West in terms of living standards. So for me, the top four are the most important (although transport infrastructure could be included).

I have known for a long time that we cannot tackle environmental issues (esp climate change) without widespread support from the genera public, but it was put to me in an interesting way a few days ago. Technology has increased steadily for the past few thousand years, and at no time during that has it caused us to treat the world better. As an example, commercial flights have got more and more efficient, meaning that less fuel is needed to travel the same distance. This should be a positive environmental effect. In fact, companies designing aircraft engines such as Rolls Royce are using this to promote their business. However, while the changes do increase efficiency, they simply allow flights to become cheaper because aircraft use less fuel. So in fact we fly more often and cause more damage to the environment in this way than we did before. There is little evidence that scientific development can actually save the environment on its own.

Of course, saying that scientific advances do not always help does not mean they cannot. And if they are combined with a general public who are determined to make the world better, then why not (the ozone layer problem is on the way to being fixed, for example)? Surely development of printable organic solar cells or even nuclear fusion can only help the situation. I am aware more than ever though, that engineering and science can give people the option of improving their lives but they have to do it themselves. Looking back at the list: if the problem of water supply is solved, that doesn't stop farmers polluting it with fertiliser; if personalised learning is improved, it gives more choice to people about whether they learn at all or not; and if nuclear terror is alleviated, another problem will arise unless we sort out the social and political reasons for terrorism. Dealing with the great challenges of engineering are nothing without tackling equally difficult challenges in society as a whole.

Carbon footprint

I'm not going to ask you to calculate your carbon footprint. I have not done it for myself, because I can't find an accurate way of doing it, and I don't entirely trust these "take 2 minutes to ask 5 questions and we'll tell you" websites.

However, I was interested that the front of Walkers crisps now has a little logo telling me that 75g Carbon dioxide was emitted for my pack of crisps. This time, before I thought about the accuracy of the figure - which is coming later - I thought to myself, I have NO idea how much that is - let's think about that for a second.

We can work it out scientifically. Do you remember GCSE science? Let's try a quick calculation (it won't hurt, promise). If you remember, we work in moles. A mole is just a number of atoms that is convenient. Carbon dioxide is CO2, so in each mole of CO2 there is one mole of C and 2 moles of O. A mole of C weighs 12 grams and a a mole of O weighs 16 grams, so we have 44 grams for a mole of CO2. My 75g of CO2 is just over one and a half moles. That's about 1,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000 (10^24) atoms, occupying about 35 litres. OK, so atoms are so small that I can't tell if that's a number that I should worry about, but 35 litres of CO2! Just for a pack of crisps?! That seems like loads! I can only assume that all goods we buy are like that, so we must generate roomfulls each day. To me it seems ridiculous that we can produce so much, how can that possibly work out if everyone is doing that?

How accurate is this figure of 75g then? Maybe it has already been taken into account, maybe not, but apart from producing the crisp and the packet, there is the transport from the factory to the shops, the possibility of people driving to the shops to buy the crisps and the cost of disposal of the rubbish. Cost of disposal includes bin lorries, rubbish sorting and decomposition of the material used in the packaging which may or may not itself produce carbon dioxide(?). Looking in even more detail at the bin lorries, they must deal with producing all of their goods like the lorries themselves and the fluorescent uniforms (although if people wear them each day maybe they buy fewer clothes?), they have to maintain the lorries, buy petrol, the employees have to get to work, they have to send out notices when bin days are changed, and also hand out bins, which must themselves be produced. Where do you stop? How can you say that my bag of crisps has a 75g carbon footprint? Does responsibility for the bag and it's footprint pass to the waste disposal people at some point? The whole calculation is much too large for anyone to find a meaningful figure in my opinion.

According to Gordon Brown yesterday, the UK produces 654 million tonnes of carbon dioxide per year. That's a lot more litres. In fact, it's over 300,000,000,000,000 litres. If you sat in the middle of a ball with that much volume, you would have to go about a marathon distance to get to the edge (43km, 27 miles). Bear in mind that carbon dioxide is naturally found in concentrations of one part in 4000 and you see that the amount of carbon dioxide we are producing will have a major effect on the carbon dioxide in the atmosphere.

No wonder something's going on.

Global warming explained

There is a lot of confusion about global warming at the moment. Over the last few months I have heard many educated people make very uneducated comments about it, but the time has passed and they are not appearing here for now. Even amongst scientists there is a lot of disagreement on the subject, with people saying it doesn't exist, or that it does, or that it's a problem, or that it isn't, or that it's caused by humans, or that it isn't.

At the moment the following post is just a theory, but I hope you find this explanation of global warming a compelling argument:

Do you remember in school you learned about the seasons? You will have seen a picture like this:

The Earth is tilted and remains tilted for the whole year, during which it moves round the sun once. When the Earth is in the position on the left, northern parts are tilted towards the sun so it is summer, while southern parts are tilted away, making it winter. When the Earth moves round to the right, it is winter in the north and summer in the south. Now have a look at this map:

It is immediately clear that most of the land is in the northern hemisphere. And most of the countries in the southern hemisphere are less industrialised, with the exception being parts of Oceania like Australia. Since the industrial revolution, large industrial chimneys have appeared all over the industrialised countries. It has been shown that the heat that power stations and factories produce is not enough to warm the planet on its own, and yet we are told that the planet seems to be heating up. Also, we see that the weather is becoming more extreme.

Both of these facts can be explained using one theory. The chimneys of the northern hemisphere are blowing the Earth out of its orbit, like a plane being propelled by blowing the air away behind it:

Now, in the northern summer (Left hand side), the north pole is closer to the sun than the southern pole is during its summer (Right hand side). The southern winter becomes colder than any winter before, and accordingly, the northern summer becomes hotter. So you see, this makes the weather vary more across the globe ie, the weather is more extreme. Variations in temperature cause wind so tropical storms become more frequent and more violent, as has been observed. And this phenomenon of extreme weather is becoming more prevalent because of the emergence of China and India, both of which are in the northern hemisphere, building more and more chimneys. We are quite literally being blown away.

Global warming has been caused because we are moving closer to the sun. We use more electricity and heating during the winter, so this gas propulsion occurs more at that time. Winter time is when we are angled away from the sun. We are blowing gas away from the sun, and hence we move towards the sun.

The Earth is not in its natural orbit. It is held out of place by the blowing of industrial chimneys. If the chimneys stopped, the planet would return to its original orbit. Thus global warming can be solved if we reduce the size of our industries.

You are probably wondering if there is any proof of this. Recently I discovered a map in the national geographic magazine. They say

"THE SCIENTIFIC EVIDENCE IS CLEAR: Surface temperatures on Earth are warming at a pace that signals a decisive shift in the global climate, one expected to last for centuries. Previous epochal changes of climate, such as the Ice Age that ended 11,500 years ago, were set in motion by natural causes—variations in Earth's orbit that affect the amount of sunlight warming the planet. In those cases, the cycles of cooling and warming unfolded slowly, over the course of millennia. This episode is different."

If you can't see the map in the link, it looks similar to this, although this is a little different. This shows the variations in temperature from the average in 2001 alone, rather than for many years, but the trend is the same.

(Image courtesy NASA-Goddard Institute for Space Studies)

The world is generally warmer, but more importantly for the theory, the warming is greatest in the northern hemisphere, as this theory suggests.

So there you have it, this is a possible cause of climate change that explains the facts neatly and logically. Any questions?

Environmental rubbish? [Read previous post first]

In my post Environmental Rubbish! , I was saying that it is completely natural that humans should mould the environment to our own needs, just as every other species does. In fact, the environmentalist standpoint is negative, the goals are unachievable, and trying to achieve environmental goals lowers our productivity.

Let us consider the arguments used again.

1) The environmentalist standpoint is negative.

Actually, the environmentalist standpoint is a challenge of improving the world so it is hard to think of it as negative. Of course, this challenge translates as limiting the damage we do to the environment by our actions, but that does not have to limit ourselves and become a negative thing.

During the industrial revolution England was a horrible place, with smog over London and coal dust blackening the stone in the north. Environmental action has taken the positive step of improving the air quality across Britain by a change in industrial practice. Nowadays, an analogous situation is that of power stations, which cause acid rain, global warming and particulate dust. We can change the industry by researching, developing and installing clean power stations. This is a positive improvement. The development process will encourage more efficient designs to save resources and money, and the change to the atmosphere will improve the health and well-being of the nation. To take the example of something that everyone can do, energy-saving light bulbs last longer and use less power than traditional light bulbs, so using them saves money as well as the environment. Reductions in energy usage, air miles and landfill are positive actions that improve our lives and improve the state of the planet.

2) The goals are unachievable

One goal set out in the previous post is indeed unachievable. This is the goal of creating a world unaffected by humans. But the real goals are simpler and more manageable. Firstly, we want to continue to survive here on Earth. Even in the worst case scenarios, we will not all die. There may be floods, droughts, extinction of animals and health problems, but there will be no self-destruction of the species or of the planet.

The next goal is to sustain our quality of life. This means that we need to use the same amount as resources as we can produce. Further to this goal, I would like to see more of the world in its natural state. But that is more than just an emotional preference. A world created by humans becomes unstable but natural processes balance out the instabilities. Therefore some natural processes must be left as they are. For instance, the rainforests absorb carbon dioxide and provide medicines among other things. We need to keep the polar ice to prevent flooding of coastal cities and to maintain the air and sea currents that determine local climates. Letting farmland revert to its natural state helps the quality of the soil. So a goal of sustainable future prosperity is a goal which provides sustainability for the environment too. Nature solves our problems so undermining nature is self-defeating. Having stopped using CFCs, the hole in the ozone layer is healing naturally and without intervention. This is an example of the world tending to a natural equilibrium, with human activity deciding whether nature is allowed to run its course.

We cannot quantify exactly how much we affect the environment so it is prudent to leave as much of nature to its own devices as possible, because it acts as a restoring balance. The equilibrium situation suits us very nicely, so the closer we can get to that, the better.

To return to the question of whether the goal is achievable, I have said that not all animals will die out and global temperatures will not rocket out of control: the planet will not be destroyed. Thus by making measured, sensible changes to our lifestyle, we do not need to reduce our quality of life significantly and we can still achieve whatever goals we set ourselves.

3)Trying to achieve environmental goals lowers our productivity

As far as economic productivity and efficiency go, I showed in the first section, that steps to improve the environment often improve efficiency. We can integrate our improvements in industry with natural technological improvement so that it stimulates innovation and speeds up economic progress.
As individuals, we need not allow environmental concerns to slow us down. Many of the choices we make are between outcomes with equal direct benefit, but the indirect benefits of one outweigh the other. For example, you are holding a piece of trash, and need to get rid of it. Recycling, putting it in a bin, and littering all achieve the same thing, but for no difference in effort, you can make the world better or worse by your choice. A holiday, whether abroad or at home, serves to relax, but one may involve flights which pollute the atmosphere, while the other may not.
Helping the environment should not scare us into inaction. We can make progress without compromising our busy, successful lives.

The conclusion to all this is that the environmental cause is not a lost cause, and it is worth aiding. It just needs a bit of sensible thought.

Environmental Rubbish!

I have been really well behaved today [Sunday]. I haven't used the kettle, I haven't listened to any music, I didn't go anywhere that needed petrol-powered transport. But it didn't make me feel better. In fact, I had a hot shower, cooked dinner that had meat in it, and turned on the computer to check my e-mails. So I have actually not been that environmentally friendly at all.

That's the problem with the environment. It's a very negative issue. People talk about saving the environment, but what are they doing? In practice, the only thing we can do is limit the effect we have on the environment. Let's take a few simple examples. A drink of water has a negative impact due to the amount of chemicals that are used in the water treatment plants to make it drinkable. If your drink is tea instead, then above the environmental cost of the water, we can add the huge amount of electricity used by the kettle, and the energy used to transport the tea over the thousands of miles from India or wherever. Another example, if you read a newspaper, the paper comes from trees being cut down, and the printing process is a very dirty one environmentally. After the paper has been read once it is thrown away, and even if it is recycled, that takes energy too. Yes, nothing that you do is environmentally neutral, let alone environmentally friendly!

But it's not even clear what we are trying to achieve? A good way to make the issue more attractive would be to create meaningful targets.
One target could be that we want to use only as much energy as the world can produce... that way we are living sustainably. It is a long way off, but if we were to succeed in that and no more, the whole world would be farmland and plantations, with no wilderness and no wildlife to protect. For me, I don't like that scenario, I'd want to go further.
Another target would be to create a world that is unaffected by humans. That is to say, a world that functions as it would if humans were not here. This is not realistic, however. Humans are here, and there are several billion of us, so we will have an effect on the planet. We could think of negating this effect by efforts of conservation, such as by saving endangered species and encouraging species diversity through habitat maintenance. But we must remember that a goal of a world unaffected by humans is not the same as a the goal of an unchanged world. An unchanging world is not a natural situation, as woolly mammoths and dinosaurs can testify (well, they can't, but that's kind of the point, isn't it). There should be some animals that become extinct, and some change in global temperatures, but everything happens very slowly. As we cannot tell how the world would develop without humans, an unaffected planet is not possible.
This shows that even taking the most optimistic scenario (which is impossible to achieve in practice), we will fail in our goals and the planet will suffer as a consequence of human existence.

There is a more positive outlook: ignore all of the environmental propaganda and see the world from a realistic standpoint. All animals have their effect on their habitat and the environment in which they live. Humans are no different. We should not apologise for what is happening. Even in the worst predictions (except those in environmental propaganda), only a small percentage of animals are going to die out during the next century, and the world's temperature should level off in a couple of centuries too. We have nothing to worry about.

The environmental movement is counterproductive. Its only achievement is to make people less productive. You can't do anything, because "it's bad for the environment" to do anything. Don't travel, don't communicate, don't read, don't expand your horizons, don't carry out scientific research... our lives will shrink away to nothing. But you won't achieve anything by that, and your life will lose all meaning. Ignore them, and don't worry, the world is a big place... it'll look after itself.

For more on this check this page again on Sunday 12th.

Common Sense

Engineering is common sense. It involves some knowledge, but mainly the ability to take what you have and use your knowledge to achieve what you want to. You just have to pick out the important thing, and then solve the problem in the simplest way possible.

Of course, I make it sound easy. But I'm not an engineer, I'm just working with engineers this summer. And common sense is really hard to come by. Engineers have years and years of training, which means that they just see an easy solution to every problem. Common sense is not common, and it is not easy, and not everyone has it. In fact, it needs work to build it up until you can see all the simple logic that is staring you in the face.

Here are a couple of bits of common sense that people often overlook:

Don't take horse tranquilisers and think you are going to be ok.

Don't sell people weapons and then expect them to open fire only when and where you want.

Treat other people how you would want to be treated.

Environmentally, do the things that have no loss and only benefits. Take washing liquid... use Ecover and it will clean your dishes without polluting our water. Turn off things that aren't being used. Boil the amount of water that you need (it takes longer to boil more). It's easy to get hung up on details, do what is obvious!

Why do we have plug-sockets near the floor? Most appliances are used at around waist height, except a vacuum cleaner; people would unplug things they aren't using if it were easier. Put it by a lightswitch, then when you turn off the light, turn off your appliances.

Staying on the environmental theme... HSBC has apparently become carbon neutral. This means that they are planting trees or something like that, to offset their emissions. If they cut down on what they use, it would work much better. It's common sense to see that nature works well on its own, so why change it? A plane gives off carbon dioxide, and trees absorb it. So far so good. But you have to plant the trees in a place where there are no other trees or greenery, no buildings, the land isn't being used for something else, there has to be enough nutrients for the trees to grow... so where is this, precisely? Then, we forget that the plane gives off more than just carbon dioxide, it produces vapour trails for example, which contribute something else to global warming. Why not switch to envelopes that don't have the plastic window? That would save our precious oil, save on landfill, and probably reduce the carbon footprint too.

Go to bed when you are tired
like I am now... (and maybe I'll stop these stupid preachy blog posts)

Difficulties one can have when purchasing apples

In an effort to do as little harm to the environment as possible, I have started looking at where my fruit and vegetables come from. Ideally, I thought, I should buy fruit and veg from Britain, or at least from Europe. That would save all the costs of moving the fruit round the world, because we all know that transport causes loads of problems when it comes to pollution, greenhouse gases, and forming vapour trails which have been shown to be another factor in global warming.

So I looked. And looked. And found strawberries. But it occurred to me that there isn't really any fruit which is in season in Britain at the moment. I found some beans and some lettuce and other vegetables, but very little fruit. There were some pears from Holland (and also from Germany last week), and some apples from France. That cheered me a little, but then I remembered that pears and apples grow in Autumn, so they should not be ripe yet either.

I had put this curious fact to the back of my mind until I got home and realised that some of the apples I had bought (all of them Pink Lady apples, all the same price, on neighbouring parts of the same shelf) were from France, and some were from South Africa!! I felt betrayed, tricked, and also BAD.

How could this be? The supermarket has chosen to source their fruit from both places, so presumably the quality and price are similar. On the one hand the South African apples are expensive because they need carrying over here across the world. But they may be cheaper in other ways. Maybe the labour there is cheaper and they run their farms better. Maybe apples are in season there, so they need less fertiliser and need no heating or greenhouses. Maybe the trees are more productive, so they take up less land. Some of these reasons are environmental as well as economic. And we don't know which reasons apply. How can we save the environment when we don't have enough information to make an informed decision?

What we do know is that it is important to look at the impacts and prioritise:

Maybe you don't care about the amount of fertiliser that is being used. In most parts of the world it is causing no problems yet in the Gulf of Mexico there are thousands of square kilometers of "dead" ocean, where all of the life has been killed off because of the chemicals put on the crops in the farmland around the Mississippi and Missouri rivers (see "The Skeptical Environmentalist" for arguments showing that this is actually necessary, otherwise we couldn't feed people).

Maybe you don't worry about global warming. Personally I think that the consequences of global warming could be severe and cause problems to humans, animals and plants alike. Global warming happened on Venus. It is the hottest planet in the solar system even though it is much further from the Sun than Mercury. Greenhouse gases caused this to happen at some point in history. Yes, I know, Venus is not the same as Earth, and it is closer to the Sun as well. But this shows that greenhouse gases are important at some level. Anyway, I don't claim that I have any proof that we need to worry about global warming, but nobody in the world knows whether the consequences will be insignificant, problematic, serious or catastrophic, and any of these are possible.

Maybe you don't worry about running out of land to grow food on. I haven't read extensively on this but I can say that we have been making decisions for many years about whether to use more fertiliser and grow more intensively (or use GM crops) or whether we flatten some wilderness and use that instead. Both of these options bother me, and I think I'd prefer to keep some wilderness. What do you think?

In any case, we must choose where we stand on these issues, because your choice of apples has impacts in all of these areas and probably others. As to our lack of knowledge on the subject and lack of guidance on apples in particular, I'll look into this a bit more when my exams are finished, and I'll let you know if I find out anything important.

Diary Entry

I have had a bit of a rollercoaster of a week (the last 7 days, not just since Monday) so I'm feeling a bit drained. Life is very stressful at the moment, for many many reasons. Some of the things that have happened this week have been good; I spent a very pleasant evening with Clare the other day. I exchanged a couple of very pleasant e-mails with a friend who I haven't spoken to properly for a while. I won a game of chess. I did a small amount of work successfully. I saw my family at the weekend. I had a really nice music rehearsal last Thursday.

Don't get me started on the bad things.

I was pleased to see a UN report on the risks of using biofuels. I have been skeptical of them for a while but not really known why. I suppose it is because it is still something that burns fuel and puts the carbon dioxide into the atmosphere. Anyway, I'm sure they will not be a major solution to our environmental problems.

I must get on. I have a ridiculous amount of work due in, because two supervisors have imposed short deadlines at once. Just another bad thing for the list.

Sorry for the boring post, next time will be fascinating I'm sure. Or something

The environment, Part I

I am at home from university for a couple of weeks, which means coming out into the countryside. I go out walking the dog, which means I can enjoy the fresh air and think at the same time...

I want to save the environment, and a lot of people think like me. I look at the countryside, and I think it's a shame that even in the countryside, every square inch is managed farmland or there for some economic purpose.

I do my best not to leave things on that use up power - all those things on stand-by get turned off if I am away for any length of time. I get very frustrated that you can only get rid of stand-by on some things by turning them off at the wall. For instance, my stereo is plugged in behind a chest of drawers, so it's very difficult to turn off completely. And there are lots of things we can do, like using public transport instead of a car, and recycling.

I think the best thing we can do for the environment is to put money into researching "green technology". I'd love all our power to be wind power, solar power, or even nuclear fusion in future. And if we can do that, we can produce hydrogen with no costs to the environment, for all these hydrogen cars and things.

There is no doubt in my mind that environmental problems are real. Global warming is real, over-fertilistion leading to eutrophication is real, pollution is real, the hole in the ozone layer is a real problem, extinctions and loss of habitats are real problems. And the list goes on.

I would like to see some section of the world that is unaffected by humans so we know what it would be like, and because I find that beautiful. Just seeing the birds, rabbits and foxes in the hedgerows and fields is a great experience, and I am pleased to be able to experience it. It is something worth protecting.