Category: Environment

A Tree Planting Genius

SM Raju has found a way to plant nearly one billion saplings in only one day: by hiring people who are below the poverty line in India to plant and then to protect trees. The plan is to pay people who would otherwise be unemployed to plant and grow trees as a family. Each year they would get some money to supplement other income sources.

The BBC has a good article on the smart tree planting scheme.

“The scheme has brought benefits to thousands of families since its implementation,” said a recent International Labour Organisation report.
But Mr Raju says that Bihar – being the poorest and most lawless state of India – has not been able to spend the allocated NREGA funds.
“This is because of a lack of awareness among officials about the scheme,” he said.
The poor monsoon this year has led to lower agricultural outputs, while flash floods in some northern districts has made the situation even worse, he said.
“So the idea struck to my mind, why not involve families below the poverty line in social forestry and give them employment under this scheme for 100 days?
“Under the scheme, each family can earn a minimum of 10,200 rupees ($210).”

Safe Sex is Good for the Planet

Researchers at the London School of Economics have released an argument that posits that family planning is one of the best things we can do to fight climate change.

Every £4 spent on family planning over the next four decades would reduce global CO2 emissions by more than a ton, whereas a minimum of £19 would have to be spent on low-carbon technologies to achieve the same result, the research says.
The report, Fewer Emitter, Lower Emissions, Less Cost, concludes that family planning should be seen as one of the primary methods of emissions reduction. The UN estimates that 40 per cent of all pregnancies worldwide are unintended.
If these basic family planning needs were met, 34 gigatons (billion tonnes) of CO2 would be saved – equivalent to nearly 6 times the annual emissions of the US and almost 60 times the UK’s annual total.

Five Ideas to Avert Global Warming

National Geographic has a short article on crazy-sounding ideas that could avert global warming. Read all five ideas here.

Digging for a Solution

Dissolving mountains of rock might sound like a mad scientist’s dream. But it’s one of the proposals for speeding up the natural process of rock weathering, as a way of absorbing CO2.

Normal rainfall is slightly acidic, and over hundreds of thousands of years, it dissolves away mountains and other rocks.

The process pulls CO2 out of the air, locking it away in the form of minerals such as limestone.

A big operation for artificial rock weathering would need big mines, and a lot of electricity to chemically split seawater to make an acid that would be sprayed over the rocks.

The approach is “basically feasible,” said Ken Caldeira, a climate scientist at the Carnegie Institution for Science in California and a co-author of the Royal Society report.

Using Psychology to Save the Environment

People will use less energy if told that their neighbours are more efficient energy consumers. That’s just one way to get people past their psychological barriers to acting more environmentally friendly according to new research out of the University of Victoria in British Columbia. New Scientist has the story.

This month, an American Psychological Association (APA) task force released a report highlighting these and other psychological barriers standing in the way of action. But don’t despair. The report also points to strategies that could be used to convince us to play our part. Sourced from psychological experiments, we review tricks that could be deployed by companies or organisations to encourage climate-friendly behaviour. Also, on page 40 of this issue, psychologist Mark van Vugt of the Free University of Amsterdam in the Netherlands describes the elements of human nature that push us to act altruistically.

The affluent young, for instance, tend to be diet conscious, and this could be used to steer them away from foods like cheeseburgers – one of the most climate-unfriendly meals around because of the energy it takes to raise cattle. So when trying to convince them to forgo that carbon-intensive beef pattie, better to stress health benefits than harp on about the global climate.

Though conservative pundits have been known to attack such efforts, characterising them as psychological manipulation or “mind control”, experiments indicate that people are willing to be persuaded. “From participants in our experiments, we’ve never heard a negative backlash,” says Wesley Schultz of California State University in San Marcos. In fact, according to John Petersen of Oberlin College, Ohio, we are used to far worse. “Compared to the barrage of advertising, it seems milder than anything I experience in my daily life,” he says.

Bottle Water Sales Decreasing

The Washington Post has some good news that’s worth noting: sales of bottle water are not faring well in the current economy. This is fantastic news for the environment as bottled water is a huge drain on resources (just think about the distance a bottle of water needs to travel compared to water from your tap).

According to Food & Water Watch, more than 17 million barrels of oil — enough to fuel 1 million cars for a year– are needed to produce the plastic water bottles sold in the United States annually. And about 86 percent of the empty bottles get thrown into the trash rather than recycled. Beverage companies have responded through recycling initiatives and purchasing carbon offsets.

Hauter said she has worked on water issues for about a decade but that the movement took off about three years ago. The group fans out to festivals and other public events pouring water for attendees into corn-based, biodegradable cups or metal containers bearing the name of its campaign, “Take Back the Tap.”