Happy (belated) new year! I have been pretty delinquent in posting on here for a long time, but I wanted to add another food post to the ones I posted two and three years ago. It is becoming more and more widely known how much animal agriculture, particularly beef, accelerates climate change, and how dramaticallyContinue reading “Inspiration for Enjoyable and Climate-friendly Eating for the New Year”
Tag Archives: climate change
None of this is nearly enough
I firmly believe that our choices matter…But I will freely admit that one family (or many families) buying solar panels or electric cars is like trying to bail out a sinking ship with a teaspoon. None of this is anywhere close to enough to address the magnitude of the crisis we’re facing.
Climate friendly yard work for those lacking a green thumb and spare time
In the months after our second son was born, one of the things we did in an attempt to make life feel less overwhelming was to hire someone to do our yard work. It was a big relief every two weeks to have our lawn neatly mowed and all the leaves blown away. I’ll be honest, Andrew had been doing the majority of our yard work so that burden hadn’t been on me anyway, but anything taken off our pile of collective responsibilities felt like a lightened load for both of us.
The Least Sexy and Most Effective Way to Slash Your Home’s Carbon Footprint
In February 2020, our home’s carbon footprint was 64% lower than it was in February 2019. In June 2020, our home’s carbon footprint was 61% lower than it was in June 2019. I love our solar panels, but they only accounted for 6% of the February difference and 39% of the June difference. The real game changer?
A Delicious New Year’s Resolution for a Livable World
Happy 2021! This year is starting out looking a lot more like 2020 than we’d like, but brighter days are on the horizon. Between the pandemic and a momentous election followed by a momentous runoff, I haven’t posted here lately, but doing what we can to turn the tide on climate change is more importantContinue reading “A Delicious New Year’s Resolution for a Livable World”
The quickest, simplest, and most effective thing you can do for the climate and our future this fall
One of the things I value most about Citizens’ Climate Lobby, where I volunteer, is their/our commitment to bipartisanship. In the midst of a bitterly divided government, where it seems harder for Congress to work together toward common goals than for me to get my three-year-old to listen, CCL has developed, in conjunction with many economists and scientists as well as politicians of both parties, a revenue-neutral carbon fee and dividend bill that is projected to lower emissions by 40% in the next 12 years and 90% by 2050.
How much does that trip really cost?! Let’s use the pandemic pause to shrink our gigantic transport and travel-related carbon footprint
There are a lot of things most of us sorely miss from before the pandemic: hugging our friends and family, eating at restaurants, hosting parties…but I don’t think any of us would say we miss rush hour traffic. I don’t think most people miss work related travel. Coronavirus related lockdowns caused record drops in carbon emissions this year, in large part related to decreases in emissions from transportation and travel. Climate scientists aren’t too optimistic about this temporary drop having much of an impact on the overall catastrophic level of carbon we’ve put into the atmosphere if we just go back to “normal” when the pandemic is over, but what if we carry forward some of our more sustainable habits from this time of crisis?
Going solar: a good kind of contagion
Georgia is home to the largest solar panel assembly plant in the Western hemisphere. The price of solar energy has plunged to a mere 4% of what it was 15 years ago, making it cheaper than coal or natural gas. So why aren’t more homeowners adopting it?
Composting made easy-enough-to-start-during-a-pandemic
I know a lot of you are stretched thinner than ever these days between working at home and caring for kids. This post is not intended to put pressure on you! But, if you’re at home and were thinking of tackling even a very minor spring cleaning/gardening/art project, I promise that starting composting will be as easy or easier.
Stop telling people that COVID-19 is a punishment for our climate sins (or that this is some sort of gift)
We’ve all seen the beautiful, almost unbelievable, images: smog-free skies in Los Angeles, canals running clear in Venice, NASA images of the dramatic drop in pollution over Wuhan. Wild animals are reclaiming areas that humans have vacated. It’s amazing that nature is so resilient as to flourish so quickly in our absence.
Kissing Carbon Goodbye 