Carbon Busters

Green is the new black. Everyone knows that. We are all doing our bit. We turn off the TV at the wall. We use eco-friendly reusable bags at the supermarket rather than plastic bags. We grow our own vegies, or at the very least buy them from a farmers’ market. As parents we all care — deeply, deeply, care — about the future of the planet we are leaving to our children, and all know we should be doing everything we can to care for the environment.

Well, knowing something and putting it in to practice are two different things. Because while many of us (and I include myself) get a warm fuzzy green glow from thinking we are being environmentally friendly, the fact is if our changes are going to make any meaningful difference, we are going to have to try a bit harder. If we really do want to save our planet, it is going to involved sacrifices beyond the convenience of using plastic bags. Below are three of the biggest changes we should all be contemplating if we are serious about halting, let alone reversing, climate change.

Stop eating meat.
Many Australian households have been cutting down on how much meat they consume, usually for health and/or economic reasons. Another reason to start cutting down on meat consumption is that it is the environmentally sustainable way to go. That said, having one meat-free meal every now and then is not going to be enough — it won’t make up for the fact that “the animals we eat emit 21 per cent of all the carbon dioxide that can be attributed to human activity,” or that according to the UN Food and Agriculture Organisation almost a fifth of all greenhouse-gas emissions come from livestock, more than from all forms of transport. In short, it is very hard to argue you are ‘going green’ if you continue to eat meat.

Both vegetarianism (where you don’t eat meat) and veganism (where you don’t consume any animal products including eggs and dairy) are slowly becoming more mainstream in Australia, as well as in the US and Europe. Many people choose to become vegan or vegetarian due to ethical or health reasons, or because it is part of their religious practice. Now there is another reason — it is good for the planet as well as your soul.

Stop flying so much.
This is a tricky one. We live in a large country, often with family members spread across the continent (if not overseas). If we want to see our family, often the only convenient way to do it is fly. However, taking your kids by plane to visit their grandparents on the other side of the country every year is not a human right. As US author Kate Gessert say in her short blog article about this issue (On Wings of Fire) “The best solution is to stay home. We all need to limit our flights to those that are truly necessary, beginning now — unless we are willing to sacrifice the biosphere for our pleasure and convenience.” And no matter how much you love your cheap flights, it is not going to change the fact that emissions from aircraft are especially problematic because of the height at which they are emitted and the particularly noxious mix of gases, making them 2.7 times more damaging than the effect of their carbon dioxide alone.

Another contribution to the amount of air travel Australians indulge in is travelling for work. Next time you decide to fly for work consider that an estimated 40% of air travel is due to business trips. While it may be hard to turn down the idea of a free trip to another city so you can attend yet another work seminar, if the organisations we work for are going to get serious about being ‘green’, this type of travel is going to have to be seriously curtailed. Ask yourself — what are you going to achieve flying to another city that could not be achieved by a video conference?

Stop buying so much stuff.
We are a nation of consumers. We buy lots of stuff. Lots and lots and lots of stuff, much of it un-needed, and often un-wanted. Recent years have seen a large rise in the amount of self-storage services being used in Australia. And not all of that is for people who are between homes or travelling overseas–often it is to store the accumulated stuff we buy that doesn’t fit in our homes but we feel we must have any way. This is despite the fact that our houses are getting bigger (the average house in Australia today is 2.5 times bigger than it was in 1970) but have less people living in them. Even if you do manage to keep everything you own in just one building, it is likely that you own a lot of surplus things you don’t really use, and probably buy more un-needed stuff on a regular basis.

Much of the new ‘green’ movement seems to tap into our need to buy more stuff. Open any website that talks about sustainability, or green issues, or saving our planet, and chances are you will be presented with the opportunity to buy t-shirts, or compost bins, or bamboo fibre sheets. Which is great is you really need another t-shirt, compost bin or set of sheets. But usually we don’t–we rationalise buying yet more stuff with the excuse that it is environmentally friendly. But isn’t the environmentally friendly choice to simply not have as many things? Not only do more things mean more resources have been used to make them, it means more resources were consumed transporting them to you. When you think about it like that, that funky hemp bag doesn’t seem quite so environmentally friendly.

No-one expects that Australia is going to turn into a nation of self-sufficient grow-and-make your own commune dwellers any time soon. But if we are going to be genuine about making moves towards a sustainable future, we have to be a bit more deliberate in our actions. That means thinking about what we do before automatically making the same choices we have always made–what are the impacts of the food you choose to eat; do you really need to fly as often as you do; do you really need to buy yet another Tupperware container/pair of shoes/cheap candle holder or could you just make do with what you already have? If we want our children to have choices about their world in the future, we need to start thinking about the choices we make today.