It is so easy to feel helpless in the face of all the grim news about what we are doing the the planet. Despite what some people seem to thing, despite the overwhelming scientific consensus, the billions of humans on this planet are actively harming the environment and changing the climate. Or maybe those evil scientists are conspiring against the plucky oil billionaires.
I am looking out for signs of hope. Just this week I posted about Pink Floyd guitarist selling his guitar collection to benefit a climate charity. Plenty of other big names have got behind the cause to spread the message and raise funds. Extinction Rebellion protests are getting lots of coverage to keep the topic in the public eye. It is just a shame that British MPs cannot turn out for a debate about getting to net zero CO2.
I found this story about companies making use of CO2 in various industrial processes that include making fertiliser and building materials. The latter would lock it up for decades at least. There have been other stories about extracting CO2 from the air, but they mostly talk about trying to bury it or otherwise put it out of the way, but using it to replace other materials has to be better and more profitable. Governments can apply pressure, but potential profits attract investors.
A simple way to lock up more carbon is to replace all the trees we are chopping down for timber or to clear land for farming. Trees also help prevent erosion and of course benefit wildlife if they are appropriate to the location. We do not have to control and replace all of nature. We are destroying environments and species that will be gone forever. You can make a simple contribution to tree planting projects by using the Ecosia search engine. Their advertising revenue goes to these projects and they publish audits. They have raised enough to plant 60 millions trees and that goes up by more than one each second. If you use the Presearch portal you can opt to use Ecosia and then you earn crypto at the same time.
Music festivals are trying to be greener by reducing plastic waste. Buying drinking water in plastic bottles when there is a perfectly good mains supply is just crazy. The young people participating in climate strikes will be forcing this sort of change. The 10k race I have run a few times is looking at ways to be greener, but the do not seem to be pushing that on their site. I have seen it on their Facebook.
This is no time for complacency. We each need to assess what changes we can make in our own lifestyles to be more sustainable whilst putting pressure on governments and industry to make larger scale changes.
Hope can drive change.
The geeky guitarist and facilitator of the 10K Minnows Project.
