The Monday Mix (25/10/2021)
Hey friends,
I’m back from my trip to Italy where I had a great time meeting friends and seeing some great places. Considering I was only there for a week I saw quite a lot and visited lots of different places.
One of the reasons for this is the excellent train infrastructure in northern Italy, which allows you to travel around easily without paying extortionate fees as is the case in England. As I mentioned last week, increasing the capacity of high-speed rail and lowering the cost of train travel is a win-win for the economy and for tackling climate change.
With the COP26 conference kicking off soon in Glasgow, I thought I’d share some climate-related articles and thoughts I’ve had this week.
So much plastic!
One thing I’ve noticed living in England and travelling is just how much plastic there is everywhere. When I say everywhere, I mean everywhere. Whenever I go for a walk, I take a bag with me and over the course of two years in England, I have picked up well over 300 bags worth of plastic. The majority of which is from one route.
Extrapolating this out to my county, Cheshire, the north of England, then the UK, Europe, and finally the whole planet, you realise the scale of the problem. If I’m filling bags on every single one of my walks in a small part of Chester, which isn’t a big city by the way, the amount of plastic elsewhere must be astronomical.
This is a huge problem.
Plastic takes a thousand years to decompose. I’ve come across 20-year-old crisp (chip) packets, that apart from the colour fading, are still in more or less perfect condition. This stuff will be around long after all of us is gone and the amount of it will only increase unless we come up with alternatives.
Plastic is convenient, hence why it’s used everywhere. But convenience has a price and that price could be a world where plastic has infiltrated every single corner.
Greenhouse gases levels rise in lockdown
In a report that shocked me, greenhouse gas levels actually rose during the lockdowns due to Covid, despite the decrease in economic activity. That is a worrying sign.
Here’s a passage that stood out to me:
“The concentration of carbon dioxide, the most important greenhouse gas, is now 50% higher than before the Industrial Revolution sparked the mass burning of fossil fuels. Methane levels have more than doubled since 1750.”
If this trend continues upwards, then any attempts at mitigation are bound to fail. Temperatures will continue to increase which will lead to powerful feedback loops we will have no control over.
It’s almost impossible to wean ourselves off fossil fuels in one fell swoop, but we can certainly reduce the amount we use now without affecting our quality of life too much. If we don’t, we’ll have no say in how much it’s affected in the future.
The Last Tree on Easter Island
This is a fantastic book I read from the new Penguin Green Ideas series the other week. It takes an extract from Jared Diamond’s book, Collapse and looks at how the society on Easter Island fell apart.
You might have figured out how this happened to the title of the book. The Easter Islanders depleted the natural resources on the island which led to the collapse of their society from its peak. With no trees left to create the tools needed to build their statues, create the boats they needed to feed themselves, they split into warring factions and never recovered.
While the metaphor is imperfect, there are chilling parallels between their story and our own. The Easter Islanders had nowhere to turn to as they were stranded in the Pacific Ocean, the nearest landmass thousands of miles away by boat. They were stuck with the devastation they had wrought. We too, only have one planet. The damage we do to it will affect the quality all of us and our descendants have.
A passage from the book that really stuck with me was when Jared pondered what the islander who cut down the last tree thought when landed the fatal blow. The same applies to us, what will we think when the majority of the Amazon is gone? When the oceans are swamped with plastic? Or, when we swelter in heatwaves? I like to think there’ll be plenty of introspection but I don’t think there will be.
Book I’m reading - Debt: The First 5,000 Years
I’ve just started this book, which I’m looking forward to reading even if it is the size of a brick! It’s by the late David Graeber, who was one of the most original thinkers of the past few decades and looks at the history of debt throughout various societies.
Quote I’m pondering: “[T]he values to which people cling most stubbornly under inappropriate conditions are those values that were previously the source of their greatest triumphs.” - Jared Diamond
That’s all for this week.
Until next time,
Tom