Hallström, E., Löfvenborg, J.E., Moreaus, L. et al. Iron intake and iron status of Swedish adolescents with diets of varying climate impact.
Eur J Nutr64, 93 (2025). https://doi.org/10.1007/s00394-024-03572-y
Abstract
Purpose
The
risk of inadequate micronutrient intake is a concern of low-climate
impact diets. This study analyzes the prevalence of iron deficiency (ID)
among adolescents with varying dietary climate impact, with special
reference to different types and dietary sources of iron.
Methods
Data on dietary intake (n = 3099) and plasma ferritin (n = 1030)
were from Riksmaten Adolescents 2016–2017 survey of Swedish girls and
boys aged 11–18 years. Dietary climate impact was estimated with life
cycle assessment data. Linear and logistic regression models assessed
associations between dietary climate impact, intakes of iron and food
groups, and ID.
Results
Higher
total iron and heme, but not non-heme, iron intake, was linearly
associated with higher dietary climate impact. Compared to girls, boys
had higher climate impact and low prevalence of ID. Girls in the highest
climate impact quartile had 56% lower odds of ID (OR 0.44, 95% CI
0.24–0.81) compared to the lowest quartile, whereas no association was
found in boys. Lower intake of red meat and heme iron was associated
with ID in girls, while higher intake of dairy was associated with ID in
boys. Menstruating girls and adolescents born outside of Sweden were
identified risk groups for ID.
Conclusions
Girls
with a more climate-friendly diet and lower intake of red meat/heme
iron may be at higher risk of ID compared to girls with higher dietary
climate impact. These results highlight the importance of considering
risk groups of ID, such as menstruating girls, in the transition to more
plant-based diets with lower climate impact.
= = = = = = =
This is an insightful article on the negative health impact that "environmentally friendly" diets have.
Right. I’m not going
to start the day with a row, so I’ll accept from the get-go that the
world’s climate is changing and that our endless thirst for food, power
and travel is probably responsible for it. India consumes 850,000 tonnes
of lamb every year, China opens a new coal-fired power station every
two weeks and The Donald has decided he’s going to wring the Texas
oilfields dry like they’re a dishcloth. So it stands to reason that you
and your family should try to reverse all of this by using cutlery made
from bamboo. Actually, the problem I have with the environmental debate
is that campaigners say we should all go a great deal further than that.
I read last week about a
woman who’d been studying for a PhD in climate science. She’d travelled
to Scandinavia and the Arctic to research the issue but became so
worried by what the future held, she quit her studies and moved with her
mother to Scotland, where she grew hair on her legs and now spends her
days riding around the Highlands on a bicycle.
Mad?
Not really. That’s what the ecoists want us all to do. They want us not
going on holiday, not having a car, not eating meat, not being warm in
the winter and paying everything we earn in tax to that madman Ed
Miliband, so he can carpet-bomb the countryside with solar panels and
wind turbines.
There’s
no sense of realism. They post pictures of themselves on Instagram
saying they are eating lettuce and sleeping in a shipping container, and
that as a result they are living their best life. But they’re not. I’m
living my best life, which is why, when I can’t be bothered to drive
somewhere, I use a helicopter.
They
want socialism at its most terrible. They tell us not to strive for a
better life because a better life will be no such thing. It will be a
hot life. A wet life. A terrible life. Much better to live in Scotland
and go for bicycle rides all day and wait for the state to send you some
sunflower seeds. Because that’s all you need to survive.
You
never really get any balance from them. There’s never an acceptance
that the rest of us want a few creature comforts and the odd hot dog.
Which is why I always approach an ecomentalist with presagged shoulders
and a heavy sigh.
And
that was pretty much my state of being when I pulled up outside a
floating farm in Rotterdam docks last week. A sign outside explained
that “with our circular and climate adaptive food production, we want to
contribute to a healthier, more aware and more sustainable society”. I
half expected to be greeted by Chris Packham himself, who, incidentally,
now has identical hair to Sir Starmer. Seriously. Google it.
Anyway,
I wasn’t. Instead, out came a chap called Peter van Wingerden, who’s a
committed environmentalist. But he’s also an engineer. And because he’s
practical, instead of telling us to live in a cave and become
vegetablists, he has worked out a way of farming that doesn’t seem to
harm the environment at all.
On
the top deck of his £3 million floating concrete barge, which nestles
in a corner of the docks, there are about thirty dairy cows. You can
smell them before you see them, that’s for sure. It’s a country smell.
And, among the tugs and the cruise liners and the cranes and the
container ships, it’s puzzling.
Everything
up there is automated. A robot milks them and another spends its time
driving around, hoovering up their urine and their faeces, which is then
turned into pellets and sold to people who want a healthy way of
fertilising their gardens. Or it’s made into house bricks. I kid you
not. Peter is making bricks from shit.
And
it gets better because some of the faeces is held back and used as a
heat exchanger, which is necessary to power the desalination plant he’s
built on the second floor, to turn the salty water from the docks into a
dew-fresh refreshment the cows can drink. Poorier, if you will. And the
power for all this? It comes from a floating array of solar panels that
are only occasionally bashed into by the tugboat captains who resent
his presence in the docks. And the smell.
BEN CHALLENOR
The
milk and cheese that results from this enterprise is then shipped to
nearby shops, where he picks up the bread that’s past its best and bits
of orange peel, which he mixes with the waste product from nearby
breweries to produce a healthy and nutritious diet for the cows. He even
stirs in grass clippings he gets from Feyenoord football club’s
stadium, the largest in the city. I was there with Kaleb, who thought he
knew all about cow farming. But he was stunned by this.
So
was I, because at present farms are located away from the cities and
the suburbs. And it’s not because the countryside has the best soil. It
doesn’t. Our forefathers found the best soil and built a house on it so
they could use the garden outside to grow stuff. And then everyone else
piled in until there was a village, and then a town, and pretty soon all
the best soil was buried under a billion tons of Birmingham. Or
Carlisle. Or Tiverton.
So
we are growing our food at present in the worst soil and then shipping
everything to where people live on a lorry. You don’t need to do that
with the floating farm because it’s already there. And Peter doesn’t
have to advertise its presence to the locals. They already know. They
are told every morning by their noses.
Soon
a new below-sea-level hydroponic vegetable enterprise will come on
stream, and much of what this produces will be used to feed the vegans
and flavour the cheeses for normal people. And the prices? Well, a litre
of milk from the floating farm costs exactly the same as a litre of
organic milk from the supermarket.
So
there you are. No transport to worry about. Power from the sun. Water
from the sea. And food from what we throw away. And you can put actual
milk in your tea, not some godforsaken nut juice that had to be shipped
to your kitchen from California.
Peter
and his wife, Minke, who has the bluest eyes I’ve ever seen on a human
being, have also opened a farm shop. It’s just like the one we have at
Diddly Squat; he even has a neighbour who writes to the council every
day urging them to close it down.
I
left the floating farm, genuinely surprised by the elegant simplicity
of it all. And then I started thinking about the UK, where we have
underused docks in Liverpool and Manchester and Hull and Bristol and
Southampton and London Anyone thinking what I’m thinking?
It comes amid concerns that Verra, a Washington-based nonprofit, approved tens of millions of worthless offsets that are used by major companies for climate and biodiversity commitments, according to a joint Guardian investigation earlier this year.
Dom Phillips and Bruno Pereira have been killed in an undeclared global war against nature and the people who defend it. Their work mattered because our planet, the threats to it and the activities of those who threaten it matter. That work must be continued.
With Cop27 continuing, the world is still talking very seriously about the environment and what we have done to it, and what our relentless drive for more growth and more stuff might mean for people everywhere in the years ahead.
As you will no doubt be aware, the news from Egypt could scarcely be bleaker, with UN secretary general António Guterres telling world leaders that humanity is on a “highway to climate hell with our foot on the accelerator”.
The financial cost of climate change was also laid bare at the global summit last week when it emerged that poor countries would need $2 trillion (€1.98 trillion) a year in funding by 2030 just to cope with climate breakdown.
The money will have to be spent to help climate-vulnerable states to switch away from fossil fuels, invest in renewable energy and other low-carbon technology, and cope with the effects of extreme weather.
With talk of trillions of dollars and the failure of countries – including this one – to take the crisis as seriously as it should be taken, it would be easy to surrender to the negativity. But while much of the narrative that swirls around climate change is how much it is going to cost, both on a global and on a personal level, that is by no means the full picture, and there are many ways being environmentally friendly will actually save you money while simultaneously reducing your carbon footprint.
Here are just 10 ways you can make a difference and cut your spending too.
1
Drive less
Too many of us – including Pricewatch – rely too much on our cars to cover even small distances. And that reliance is having a terrible impact on the planet and our wallets.
Road transport accounts for about a fifth of carbon-dioxide emissions across the EU, with passenger cars making up 61 per cent of the emissions from road transport. So a concerted effort to drive less would have a significant impact on the level of pollution we produce. How much? Well, every kilometre you choose not to drive when you otherwise might have will save about 250g of CO2 emissions. That means if you use your car just one day less each week than in the past you will see your CO2 emissions fall by tens of thousands of kilogrammes every year.
The move will also save you hundreds of euro each year. The average motorist drives 16,000km every year, and if the average price of a litre of diesel right now is €2.02 – as the AA tells us – then driving the average family car, which does 12.4km per litre (35 miles per gallon), will cost about €2,606 annually. If you were to reduce your fuel bill by just 20 per cent you would save more than €500 over the course of the next 12 months.
Drive smarter
It is not all about how much you drive; how you drive matters too. If you could cut the amount of fuel you use by even 5 cent by being a bit more canny about how you use your car, then you would reduce your carbon footprint and save yourself another €120 or so each year. So do not over-rev your engine, drive in the right gear, and at a slightly slower speed on a motorway. Keep your boot empty, your tyres at the right pressure, get your car serviced, remove any roof boxes or racks that cause a drag on your car and only use the heat or air conditioning if you absolutely have to.
Get on your bike
The humble bicycle is one of the best ways of lessening your personal pollution levels while improving the quality of your life and saving you money into the bargain. By taking advantage of the tax breaks available to cyclists and their employers, you can get a decent bike for a knock-down price. The Bike to Work scheme covers bicycles and accessories up to a maximum of €1,250, rising to €1,500 for an electric bike. Your employer buys it and you pay for it, tax-free, over 12 months, which effectively knocks about 40 per cent off the price. If your commute is just 8km each way and you usually drive, then you will save about €600 a year in fuel costs alone each year. That is less than the bike and gear will cost you, which means you will be better off just 10 months after you buy your bike. And you will keep saving money after that.
Keep your house in order
If your attic was insulated decades ago, you might want to have it redone and take advantage of SEAI grants to do it. Those grants could be worth 80 per cent of the total cost – or €800. And getting a decent job done in the weeks ahead could see your energy costs fall by €120 over the course of a year while simultaneously reducing your CO2 emissions. Don’t forget to police the heating and lighting of your home while washing your clothes on an eco setting, reducing your reliance on your tumble dryer and immersion and ensuring your boiler is serviced. All of that could lessen your domestic carbon footprint by 10 per cent and save you €400 into the bargain.
Eat less meat
Not a universally popular notion in this country, but it is one worth considering. Serious climate activists will suggest that you eat no meat and consume no dairy products on the basis that it is one of the biggest drivers of global warming. But Irish people love their meat products, which is why we consume twice the global average of meat. But 25 per cent of the average Irish person’s carbon emissions comes from diet and, by becoming a vegetarian, a person can dramatically reduce one’s emissions. But only about 5 per cent of Irish people follow a vegetarian diet, with the number of vegans much lower again. We are not going to suggest that the 95 per cent who do eat meat should cut it out immediately, but if we were all to reduce the amount of it we consume, it would be better for the environment, better for our health and better for our wallets, particularly at a time when meat and dairy prices are climbing at as much as three times the rate of general inflation. Let’s say you spend €20 a week on steak and mince for two dinners and you replace that with €5 worth of beans, vegetables or pulses, you will save yourself €750 over the course of a year and you probably won’t notice a huge difference in the quality of your life, while the quality of your diet might actually improve.
Tackle your food waste
The food we throw away is another big problem when it comes to both the planet and our pockets. We bin more than a million tonnes of food every year. That hurts the environment on multiple levels. The waste produces toxic methane in landfill, for one. But it also has to be transported from the home, the farm, the shop or the restaurant to that rubbish tip. And then, of course, there is the huge impact the production of the food we do not eat has on the environment.
By far the most environmentally friendly way to cut your emissions in this area is to eat what you buy, and don’t buy more than you need. If a typical Irish grocery bill is about €8,000 per year and you are absolutely ruthless about reducing waste, you could see that bill fall by at least €1,000. So, make a meal plan and a list and base the list on what you already have in your presses, your fridge and your freezer. Stick to the list. Don’t be suckered into buying stuff you don’t need by the promise of special offers. Make more effective use of your freezer. If you are not going to use a full sliced pan before the bread turns mouldy, put a few slices in a freezer bag. Don’t pile food on to plates – serve it in communal bowls. That way people can eat what they want and what is left in those bowls is more likely to be reused.
Stay local
Rather than driving to a faraway place to do a big shop, consider what alternatives are in your neighbourhood and then buy what you need from your local butcher, baker or vegetable shop. Where possible, shop in farmers’ markets and co-ops and buy food that is grown locally. And if your wallet allows it, buy more organic products – they are better for the environment and, possibly, better for you too.Reduce, reuse, recycle This is a much-used phrase but, while you might be tired of hearing it, adhering to it will save you money and reduce your carbon footprint. In essence, we need to consume less and use it for longer and in more ways than it was intended. And then, once we are done with it, try to find another home for it. So, maybe think twice before buying. Do you really need it? Will it really last? And if you can afford it (and we know that not everyone can), buying better by buying less is a mantra to live by.Look at your clothes The production of textiles is the fourth-largest cause of environmental pressure after food, housing and transport, according to the European Environment Agency, while the United Nations has described the industry as the second-worst polluter on the planet, behind oil. The textile sector generates about 10 per cent of the world’s greenhouse gas emissions, pumping at least 1.2 billion tonnes of CO2 into the atmosphere every year.
That makes fashion worse for the environment than air travel and shipping combined. The industry also uses more water than a country the size of Ireland and pollutes rivers with dyes and toxic chemicals. Globally, close to 100 million tonnes of textile waste is created every year, which works out at about one rubbish truck full of clothes heading into landfill every single second. Try to be part of the solution by shopping smarter when it comes to clothes.
Only ever buy what you need and try to find alternative sources when shopping. By buying clothes second-hand, for instance, you can acquire new stuff – if you need it – without contributing to the climate crisis and, depending on where you choose to shop, you can also support worthy causes when you spend. And such an approach will definitely save you money. Second-hand thriftiness is also very on-trend.
Don’t confine yourself to local charity shops either. DoneDeal and eBay are great for finding specific items, while Thriftify.ie is a rather brilliant way to shop across hundreds of charity shops without leaving your couch. And then there is the notion of a black bin party. And what is that? It’s a fun way to get new clothes and hang out with your mates. Get everyone to put all the clothes that they no longer have any use for into a bin bag. Everyone brings their bags to someone’s house. Open wine, dump everything on the floor and then rummage around for things you might like. Bring whatever is left behind to a charity shop.
And some other measures
Only drink tap water. Plant more house plants. They will do their bit to suck some of the carbon out of the atmosphere. If you are not overly green-fingered, pick easy-to-grow things such as bamboo – it is a nice house plant, grows quickly, is low-maintenance and can suck as much as four times the amount of carbon dioxide from the air as other plants. Use keep cups – many decent coffee shops will give you a discount if you do. Work from home. It will save you money on commuting costs. Use soap rather than shower gel.Take all these steps and we reckon you could handily save yourself a couple of grand. And feel better about yourself into the bargain.
One tonne of iPhones would deliver 300 times more gold than a tonne of gold ore and 6.5 times more silver than a tonne of silver ore
Our smart phones are full of precious metals and we would need to consider not to change phones with the frequency we do now (i.e. about 11 months we get a new phone).
Apart from the huge environmental issues, the point that needs to be considered is how these metals are recovered by children.
So, educating our children on these issues can be a great New Year Resolution.
And, please, watch the film "Don't look up" under the prism of this post.
Eco-investigator and New Jersey native, Alissa MacMillan,
seeks to find answers to your everyday questions about tough decisions
we all face, when acting in the best interests for the environment.
A freelance writer and philosophy lecturer, Alissa is a former features
reporter for the New York Daily News and has been living in County
Limerick for nearly eight years. Your queries on all matters
environmental, are welcome.
First minister of Scotland, Nicola Sturgeon attends the opening of The
European Offshore Wind Deployment Centre located in Aberdeen Bay on
September 7th, 2018 off the coast of Aberdeen, Scotland. Photograph:
Jeff J Mitchell/Getty
Imagine a person who can only lose
weight, not by going on a diet, but by accidentally running out of
food. It is a grim fact that Ireland’s only really effective way of
responding to climate change has been to go into recession. We succeed
by failing.
Since
2005 the most significant reductions in greenhouse gas emissions were
caused by the implosion of the economy between 2008 to 2012. This
“success” will be repeated in 2020 because of the coronavirus crisis,
whose main benign effect is a likely reduction in Irish carbon emissions
of around 12 per cent this year.
If
the recession it causes is deep enough, we may even, as Samuel Beckett
has it, fail better. It is an Irish twist on the idea of collateral
damage: collateral benefit. Bomb the economy and we get some green
shoots of climate action.
We have a very clear example right next door of the viability of rapid change. If Scotland can do it, so can Ireland
As a
strategy, this surely has its limits. But of course, it is not a
strategy at all. It is accident, not action. The decent environmental
consequences, when we’ve had them, have been not merely unintended but
unwanted. They result, not from getting our act together, but from
things falling apart. Once we get up and running and again, we go back
to pumping out the gases.
What
does it say about leadership on climate change when disasters have been
much more effective in allowing us to meet our international
obligations than any official plans?
If
Ireland is to get anywhere close to fulfilling the stated aim of being a
leader on climate change, it must start with a radically transformed
sense of national purpose.
The
best way to grasp what this means is simply to look to the country that
is probably closest to Ireland in size, geography and culture:
Scotland. The Scottish government is less powerful than ours – it does
not enjoy full sovereignty. Yet its performance on climate change is
light years ahead of Ireland’s.
Scotland
deliberately made things hard for itself. The UK government set a
target of a 32 per cent reduction by 2020 on the level of greenhouse gas
emissions in 1990. In the Climate Change Act unanimously adopted by the
Scottish Parliament in 2009, the target is 42 per cent by 2020 and 80 per cent by 2050.
How has it fared?
Radical change
Scotland
will not reach its 42 per cent reduction target in 2020. It met it in
2015, five years early. It is now at 47 per cent. It went from getting
10 per cent of its electricity consumption from renewable sources 15
years ago to 60 per cent now. It is on track to get near its 100 per
cent target in the early 2020s.
And
Scotland’s neighbour to the west? More like its evil twin. Ireland set
less ambitious targets and failed abysmally to meet them.
Ireland’s
target was a 20 per cent reduction in greenhouse gas emissions by 2020,
relative to 2005 levels. Before the coronavirus crisis, the
Environmental Protection Agency’s emissions projections indicated that,
by 2020, a reduction of between five and six per cent will have been
achieved.
Scotland’s leaders deliberately chose a target high enough to excite their citizens
Without
radical and rapid change, cumulative Irish emissions of greenhouse gases
are also on course to exceed the 2030 target of 376 million tonnes of
carbon dioxide equivalent, by between 52 and 67 million tonnes.
In
Scotland, emissions from transport increased by 0.4 per cent from 1990
to 2017. Over the same period in Ireland, emissions from transport rose
by 133 per cent. Scotland already gets twice the proportion of its
electricity (60 per cent) from renewables as Ireland does (30 per cent).
Scotland
is on course to plant 10,000 new hectares of forestry every year. The
rate of afforestation in Ireland in 2017 actually fell to 5,000
hectares, with provisional figures for 2018 falling even further to
4,000 hectares. At these rates, Ireland will not attain the national
policy goal of covering 18 per cent of land with forest any time in the
21st century, let alone within the lifetime of any current climate
action plan.
At
one level, this shameful contrast is actually good news. It makes a
nonsense of the claims that radical reductions in Ireland’s emissions
are extremely hard to achieve or wildly impractical. We have a very
clear example right next door of the viability of rapid change. If
Scotland can do it, so can Ireland.
But
we have to start with the obvious question: why are the Scottish and
Irish records so starkly different? The answer has nothing to do with
resources and everything to do with leadership. One country has been
well led on climate change, the other – to put it very charitably – has
not.
Looking
at the Scottish experience, five things stand out in defining the way
this good leadership expressed itself. These are the things an incoming
Irish government should copy and paste.
Scottish first minister Nicola Sturgeon meets Taoiseach Leo Varadkar
at Government Buildings in Dublin in October 2017. Photograph: Artur
Widak/NurPhoto/Getty
1. Pride
First,
Scotland took pride in setting itself a big challenge. People are
motivated by thrilling new possibilities, not by grudging concessions.
While Ireland set the bar low and failed abjectly to clear it,
Scotland’s leaders deliberately chose a target high enough to excite
their citizens.
As
Andrew Kerr, executive director of the Edinburgh Centre for Carbon
Innovation, told the Citizens’ Assembly in Dublin in 2017: “Political
vision and leadership in putting forward a challenging target, and
corralling the resources and narrative around delivering that target,
was as important for setting the framework for tackling climate change
as robust evidence that it was achievable.”
The
dominant tone on climate change from Irish governments has been
negative – this is bad stuff we are being forced to do because we had to
sign all these international agreements.
Even
now, action on the single most important question facing humanity is
framed negatively. It is not climate change that “threatens rural
Ireland”, for example – it is the action needed to prevent it. The Scots
decided to tell themselves a different story: we can do this. Ireland’s
story has never got beyond: do we really have to do this?
Ironically,
one of the reasons for this may be that Scotland has been debating
national independence. The idea of a big collective project, a practical
expression of national willpower, fed into – and was in turn fed by – a
desire on the part of Scots to prove to themselves that they could
achieve big things together.
Ireland,
with a century of independence behind it, seems to have lost that
collective desire. If we are to get serious about climate change we will
have to find it again.
2. Monitoring
Second,
having set these ambitious targets, the Scots had rigorous independent
monitoring and analysis of how they were doing. Measuring how things
were progressing became, in Kerr’s words, “a normal part of
parliamentary debate and engagement, involving extensive consideration
each year”.
Scotland
was a pioneer in developing rigorous systems of monitoring and
evaluation, with annual reporting to parliament and a major assessment
of progress by a fully independent body every two years.
Ireland,
by contrast, did not even pass a Climate Change Act until 2015 – six
years after the Scottish Parliament did so. The EPA monitors emissions
and there is now a very capable Climate Change Advisory Council.
But
“advisory” is the key word. Irish governments are very good at ignoring
advice they don’t want to hear. There is no effective mechanism for
holding government departments or public bodies accountable for meeting
specific targets in specific time frames.
Scotland has had very strong civil society engagement on climate change
As the
Oireachtas climate change committee recommended last year, the “advisory
council” needs to be replaced by a powerful “action council”, which
will, among other things, produce five-year carbon budgets. It must have
its own statutory multi-annual funding to ensure its independence.
But
these changes need to be part of a much bigger transformation of the
official mindset. Behind those appalling increases in emissions from
transport, for example, is an inability to link the way we plan urban
development to climate change.
If
you make housing unaffordable in the big cities, you force people to
commute long distances. If you don’t invest sufficiently in public
transport, commuting is done in cars that emit greenhouse gases. Ireland
has ended up with one vehicle for every two people (including children)
and we now drive nearly 50 billion km a year.
3. No trade-off
Third,
the Scots refused to frame the whole question as a trade-off between
the environment and the economy. Perhaps because Scotland was already a
major oil producer, it was primed to think of the development of
renewable energy as a huge economic opportunity.
Scotland
sought successfully to attract investment into these new energy
sources. Doing the right thing could also be credibly presented as a
strategy for economic growth.
In
Ireland, by contrast, the issues are largely framed in terms of
reductions in activity – cutting the excessively large national beef
herd, for example. Good leadership should articulate the benefits of
replacing expensively imported oil and gas, creating new jobs and
developing new technologies.
4. Ownership
The
fourth thing the Scots have been good at is fostering a sense of
community ownership. This is not just a matter of encouraging and
supporting local communities in developing their own energy projects. It
is also about literal ownership.
The
Scottish government set a target for 500 megawatts of locally owned
energy generation facilities by 2020. It has already exceeded this and
reset the target to 1,000 megawatts. Profits from these projects return
to the communities who can then decide how best to invest the money.
Unsurprisingly, planning objections to wind farms are much rarer in
Scotland than in Ireland.
5. Engagement
Fifth,
Scotland has had very strong civil society engagement on climate
change. It has not been an issue only for environmental activists.
Churches, trade unions, scientists and business leaders pushed for the
more ambitious targets to be adopted and met.
Business groups like the Scottish Whisky Association
have pushed hard on the benefits of Scotland being seen globally as a
clean, green place. Builders switched to constructing timber-framed
houses, which are both more environmentally friendly and a good fit with
large-scale forestry planting.
Absence of leadership
We
don’t have to look very far, therefore, to see what good leadership
looks like. Generate a sense of national purpose. Set up rigorous
monitoring of, and accountability for, very specific targets. Embrace
the economic opportunities. Give communities ownership. Keep civil
society and businesses engaged.
But
none of this is going to happen in Ireland if adapting to climate
change is approached through the usual miasma of grudge and grievance.
Or if we fail to understand that the economy cannot be restarted after
the coronavirus crisis – it must be reimagined. Or if meeting our
international obligations is framed as a concession by the “mainstream”
to the Green Party rather than a collective challenge for government,
society and the economy.
The
absence of leadership emerged in the recent Sign of the Times 2020
study as the biggest factor in public disheartenment about Irish
responses to climate change. Part of the problem, though, seemed to be
that people were looking for saintly figures like David Attenborough to lead them. There won’t be any in the next Irish government.
But
leadership doesn’t need to be saintly. It needs to be challenging,
rigorous, accountable and decisive. If people can’t manage to meet those
standards, they shouldn’t be in government at all. If they can, this is
the time to show it.
tonight, I watched the controversial "Planet of the Humans".
I loved it!
It's a film with a clear message: let's stop the bullsh...... about green-washing and biodiesel and hydrogen cars and electric cars that run on electricity which comes from 60% non renewable energy.
Let's be frank to our kids and to our students: we messed it up and we keep messing it up; but this time we are using fanciful terminology like "sustainable palm oil", "minimum carbon impact" etc etc
We consume endlessly, we are using lots of energy and the recycling technology is still infant.
Just one example : have you thought what is happening to your old mobile phone when you get rid if it? where does it end? what percentage can it be recycled? and what about the rest, the non-recyclable parts? where do they end?
Few questions with easy answers...answers easily found on the internet, in the lock-down days we are living.
p.s. the film prompted me to read a bit more about Bill McKibben and Mike Shellenberger...
Bill claims that biofuels are green (i.e. sustainable) and Mike calls nuclear energy ...clean.
Needless to say that they are both wrong.
"The Greens in the European Parliament demanded, on Friday, April 17, an
investigation to the Union ombudsman, Emily O’Reilly, on an astonishing
call for tenders from the Brussels Commission: wishing to incorporate
into banking supervision “Environmental and social factors”, it
has signed a contract with the American company BlackRock. The American
multinational, the world’s largest asset manager, is for the Greens –
and dozens of other MEPs, members of several groups – clearly at the
heart of a conflict of interest ".
"The Financial Market Advisory (FMA) Division of the largest asset
manager in the world was awarded the 550,000 euros foreseen by the
tender published by the Commission, surpassing 8 other competitors,
including only 2 PMIs. In particular, BlackRock will indicate how: (i)
banks should integrate ESG factors into the risk management process and
their strategies; (ii) the authorities should integrate ESG risks into
prudential regulation".
The Wellcome Sanger Institute will lead the effort to sequence the genetic codes of all 66,000 species known to inhabit Britain.
Photograph: Arterra/UIG via Getty Images
this blog is about functional food, but in order to produce functional and sustainable foods for the People, we need also to keep an eye on human rights and sustainability environmental topics.
Jose Claudio Ribeiro da Silva and his wife
Maria do Espírito Santo, Amazon activists who campaigned against
illegal deforestation, were killed in an ambush in May 2011. Photograph:
Reuters
Produced by Monica Ulmanu, Alan Evans and Georgia Brown Last updated on NaN undefined NaN
The defenders
This year, in collaboration with Global Witness, the Guardian will
attempt to record all of the deaths of people who are killed while
defending their land, forests, rivers or wildlife – most often against
the harmful impacts of industry. We will also document the stories of
some of the land and environmental defenders still under attack
