Environment – Page 37 – Things Are Good

Ship Slowly for Greener Online Shopping

money

It’s that time of year when people buy objects for others because of social obligations or religious practices. When purchasing goods we obviously need to think about the story behind the things being bought (who made it, where it comes from, etc.). If you’re buying stuff online then you should also think about shipping methods beyond the quickest. It turns out online shopping can be the greener option as long as you don’t use the fastest shipping option. Of course, like many environmental issues this one can also be solved by not buying useless stuff.

A 2013 study from MIT’s Center for Transportation and Logistics calculated that the carbon footprint of a traditional shopper purchasing a toy in a store is higher than that of someone who buys the same thing online with regular shipping (more about that later).

That’s because parcel carriers use a more efficient delivery system than you driving to the mall, and the carbon footprint of a website is smaller than that of a brick-and-mortar store.

Climate Change Deniers Just Need Motivation

Water

The COP24 UN Climate Change Conference 2018 in Katowice, Poland has opened with a direct call for immediate action on climate change. You’d think that 99% of scientists, years of evidence, weather records being broke every month, and even oil companies admitting climate is real would motivate people to care. However, it’s the very fact that there is so much evidence of the damage of climate change that people don’t care about acting on it. This ironic twist is thanks to the perceived mental workload one has to handle in order to feel motivated to buy fewer things.

“A big part isn’t the experience; it’s the motivation,” said Paul Thagard, professor emeritus at the University of Waterloo’s Department of Philosophy, who specializes in cognitive science.

“Psychologists talk a lot about ‘motivated inference’ â€¦ when people have strong motivations, they’re very selective in the sort of evidence they look for.”

Even though there is consensus that climate change is occurring and that humans are exacerbating it, there are still people â€” including politicians â€” who refuse to acknowledge the evidence.

How Individuals and Governments can Save Bees

bee

Butterflies and bees need our help. They’re currently dying off due to changes in their environments while also being sprayed with deadly pesticides. A bunch of countries have banned the bee-killing pesticides, but that’s not helpful in the short term for beers or farmers. The progress at the policy level is needed and is slowly being rolled out around the globe.

At the individual level there is already stuff we can do to help the bees and our farming friends. All you have to do is plant some native species that your local pollinators love. Oh, and that means lots of butterflies.

The essence of the technique is to devote one in every four cultivation strips to flowering crops, such as oil seeds and spices. In addition, she provides pollinators with cheap nesting support, such as old wood and beaten soil that ground nesting bees can burrow into. Sunflowers were also planted nearby as wind shelters.

â€œThere is a very low barrier so anyone in even the poorest country can do this. There is no equipment, no technology and only a small investment in seeds. It is very easy. You can demonstrate how to do it with pictures sent on a cellphone.â€

Compared with control fields of pure monocultures, â€œamazingâ€ benefits for farmers and an increase in abundance and diversity of pollinators were found. Crops were pollinated more efficiently, there were fewer pests such as aphids and greenfly, and yields increased in quantity and quality.

Watch This Anti-Palm Oil Ad Banned in the UK

Palm oil gets used in plenty of consumer goods and processed foods, as a result the demand for palm oil increases every year. The problem with using palm oil is that most sources of the plant are from unsustainable farming practices. Indeed, the cultivation of palm oil greatly contributes to deforestation. Obviously this isn’t good.

When a UK grocery store wanted to advertise their line of palm-oil free products the government said no. Instead of just letting the ad sit on the shelf they posted it on YouTube for us all to see. The ad itself is based off of work done by Greenpeace and they have gathered over 670 thousand signatures to show the ad on TV. The Streisand effect strikes again.

How One Billionaire Plans to Help Save the Planet

The Swiss billionaire HansjÃ¶rg Wyss has decided to not be idly rich and watch the environment fall apart around him. He’s decided that over the next decade he will personally donate $1 billion USD to help save the planet. He will support local conservation movements, indigenous groups, and help expand national parks to protect land from developers. He wrote a an op-ed in the New York Times explaining his rationale and calling on others to help support the planet before it’s too late.

Every one of us â€” citizens, philanthropists, business and government leaders â€” should be troubled by the enormous gap between how little of our natural world is currently protected and how much should be protected. It is a gap that we must urgently narrow, before our human footprint consumes the earthâ€™s remaining wild places.

For my part, I have decided to donate $1 billion over the next decade to help accelerate land and ocean conservation efforts around the world, with the goal of protecting 30 percent of the planetâ€™s surface by 2030. This money will support locally led conservation efforts around the world, push for increased global targets for land and ocean protection, seek to raise public awareness about the importance of this effort, and fund scientific studies to identify the best strategies to reach our target.