A few months prior, I was asked to put together a proposal for a small exhibition at the event. After a quick brainstorming session I came up with a load of ideas and sent them off to see if any would be accepted. The following day an email arrived in my inbox.  After a little translating from the wonderful Marianna (it was written in Spanish) I understood all the ideas had been accepted and I had 4 weeks to bring them to life. So off I went.

The main idea was to create an exhibition using nothing but things I found on the streets of Mexico City. The final outcome ultimately ended as an eclectic selection of bottles, cans and glass. However a little extra digging revealed electrical cables, plastic sheeting, stainless steel sheeting and a load of wood.

The idea was to create an exhibition that informed and educated the audience but primarily showed that green (reusing) can be desirable. Of course I could have just made some huge crazy sculptures from rubbish but that would just show that it’s possible to turn waste into art. But hey, we already know that. I wanted it to be more inspiring, more appealing; I wanted to create objects desirable to people in the world we live in.

So that was the challenge and this is what I created.

‘Nest’: made from 100 plastic bottles attached to a rusty wire frame found on the streets and painted white. The lamp stand was found on the streets of New York during the time I lived there.  The only purchased object was a CFL light bulb as well as a splash of white paint.

(Left)  ‘Plastic Chandelier’: made from the bottom of 160 plastic bottles of almost any variety. The top of the lamp was made from a plastic paint lid; the metal rods bent into shape I got from a long piece of metal both of which were found on the street. For this, I purchased nylon thread (of which I hardly used any) and a CFL bulb.

(Right) ‘Hats’: made from 16 coca-cola bottles. Again the stand was found on the streets of New York and the CFL was (like the Nest) purchased. I also needed 16 nails that I already had.

(Below) ‘Daisy Field’ : made from the neck of 70 plastic bottles attached to a clear plastic board I found on the street. The frame was made from found wood and illuminated by LED fairy lights that I already had.

As part of the exhibition we made a short documentary where we asked people a number of questions ranging from recycling,  global warming solution all the way to asking what a sustainable city is. Surrounding this content was a number of short videos ranging from famous quotes to a short insert from Ken Yeang: a leading architect on sustainable skyscrapers. The video below is an animation I created for the event. This video was picked up by Channel 22 in Mexico and broadcast on national television. (This is the English version and below is a link to the Spanish version)

Other parts of the video can be found on our youtube channel at http://www.youtube.com/user/TheWasteProject

(Left) ‘Bottle Earth’: This was created from a burst yoga ball I had. Attached to it (using industrial glue) there were about 500 bottle tops. The idea for this was to take all the plastic bottles used at the four day event and see how much of a globe we could create from this waste. Considering this was an environmental congress, sadly we collected more than 300 plastic bottles.The idea was to show that we just are not doing enough to solve our greatest problem. I mean, come on guys, frankly this is terrible. By the end this ball was more than half full.

(Above) Surrounding the video and Eco Lamps I created 25 boards with information about our planet, global warming and human effects.

The final idea was to give something to people for them to take away with them. Here we printed the idea of the 3R’s (Reduce, Reuse, Recycle) on scrapped paper from an office a friend of ours works in.

The exhibition was really well received and apart from the video being shown on national TV, most of the lamps were purchased (that wasn’t the idea but people kept asking). The wooden boards with painted facts were bought by a guy that gives talks on the need for solar energy and will be appearing in a number of environmental publications. The giant plastic bottle globe was donated to a school for children with learning difficulties who will complete the globe from the bottles collected in their community.

So all in all, it was a great success. I could not have done it without all the help of Marianna who supported the entire project, Carine for printing things at her office, Fer for lending us her massive car , Chris and Rafa for driving us to Morelia. And of course Eduardo for introducing me to the organizers. Without these people this couldn’t have happened. Thank you.

Thanks for reading…

Ed.

PS. More photos can be found on my photo webpage http://edgregory.smugmug.com

November 6, 2009

Hi Waste Project folks,

I just wanted to send in a letter about the T. Boone Pickens lecture I went to at the University of Texas at Dallas yesterday. From someone who has been-there done-that in the 1980s and 1990s relating to: passive solar, active solar, ethanol fermentation (from waste, short rotation woody crops, etc.), wind power for ethanol plant, methane digester technology, commercial-scale liquid recycling, and someone who has been battling cynicism, I was pretty inspired.

Mr. Pickens (81 years old) was engaging and very much on the ball.  He has developed the Pickens Plan for US energy independence through rapidly expanding natural gas for energy and transportation needs along with the large-scale use of wind (and solar) power.

He is all about American independence from foreign oil; OPEC in particular.  He sees Americans using American found, and produced, energy as in the best long-term interest of America and Americans. Basically taking responsibility for our current and long-term energy needs, American security, and the American economy.

There are a number of things I really liked about The Pickens’ Plan:

1) there is a “real” plan, not just airy fairy political goal setting.  Pickens wants to see the entire US heavy-duty trucking industry convert from diesel to natural gas.

2) the plan is in real-time. He wants to do this in 10 years.

3) the plan is large. This single significant act would cut our crude oil imports substantially (about 20%) and reduce diesel tail pipe pollution by 25%.

Obviously, from Mr. Pickens’ point of view, the CNG fuel would come from current and new wells of natural gas from US soil.

4) the plans include current technologies of CNG engines, wind and solar, plus investing in new tech infrastructure (smart grid), and spending money on research for energy storage, wind tech, etc. Along with new techniques for recovering the natural gas (one problem is this technology may create other environmental problems).

5) the plan is measurable and trackable.

6) the plan is regional and national; and most importantly it can be cookie-cuttered, mass-produced, and it is duplicatable.

Mr. Pickens is trying to stay one step ahead of the looming problem of “peak oil” with all its ramifications.  His prediction of peak oil is within 36 months; coupled with the maximum world output of 85 million bbls per day of crude oil (no matter the demand) that will create $300 per barrel costs along with unforeseen social and economic fallout.

To be honest it was good to see someone stand up and propose part of a national (and worldwide?) energy plan that we can start implementing today.  We really do need to start somewhere – there is way too much talk with too little large-scale action.  We have a worldwide problem; it is going to take some world scale reaction.  I realize that substituting one non-renewable fuel for another is not the ultimate goal, but from a pragmatic point of view it is a lesser evil.

From a personal point of view I liked the lamp shade from the 16 recycled plastic bottles in Ed Gregory’s letter of Oct. 27th, but it is not climate changing action.  Maybe I’m just groping in the dark and looking to support some kind of nation-wide scale action that may lead to the positive tipping point planet Earth desperately needs.

Tom Bowden

Today was the first day of the first international congress for sustainable cities in Mexico. It is a four day event and is being held at Concenexpo oin Morelia. The event had barely begun and I found myself frustrated, partly because  of the very late and unorganized opening but mainly for the many contradictions the event has.

Now don’t get me wrong, nothing can take away the fact the having a congress for sustainable cities is a good thing but there really does need to be more effort made. For example our exposition is in a large marquee in the main plaza and the entire floor in lit from underneath like some sort of 80’s dance floor (only its only white lights) and given the event is during the day these do not have any effect. They are just a waste of energy. Much of the rest of the event follows the same theme of un-thoughtful and unsustainable thinking.

The venue itself has a large theatre which must hold at least 700 people and four smaller conference rooms which hand about 200 in each. Each containing many lights (I counted more than 40 in one of the smaller ones), sound systems and projectors.

One of the sustainable laps we are showing. Made from 16 plastic bottles

Now this sounds like a pretty normal set up right, but when speakers have an audience of about 8 it really does seem like a huge waste. I saw the minister for the environment speak and although he new his stuff (as expected) he was less than inspiring and with lines like ‘Mexico really doesn’t have much of a problem compared to china and the USA’, he really didn’t excite the audience to act.

Lunch, was this sustainable in any way? To my eyes, not at all. Meat everywhere, lots of food, lots of waste and absolutely no information about any of it. So either it was in no way sustainable which means the event is massively floored or if it is in any way sustainable it was not advertised so it was not leading by example or showing any kind of forward thinking.

The is a list longer than my arm in which this event frustrates me but I won’t bore you with more details.

I just believe that if we really want to make a change we have to try a lot harder. Having a congress is great but using the same techniques just doesn’t cut it. We need an event that will show change, prove its possible, lead by example and make everyone want make a change. This is the type event I want to be a part of, this is the event I will create with The Waste Project.

Lets see what day two brings tomorrow.

Ed.

First, I need to say that I loved it.  Second, here’s a quick synopsis (quoted from the blogsite): “For one year, my wife, my 2-year-old daughter, my dog and I, while living in the middle of New York City, are attempting to live without making any net impact on the environment. In other words, no trash, no carbon emissions, no toxins in the water, no elevators, no subway, no products in packaging, no plastics, no air conditioning, no TV, no toilets…”  And so they do.  The project occurs in 4 stages over the course of the year.

Why did I like it so much?  Well, first of all, Colin Beavan and wife, Michelle Conlin aren’t your average environmental fringe extremest (for clarity’s sake I’m going to use first names).  Michelle is a self-proclaimed shopaholic and coffee addict.  She’s what some might call a “good consumer.”  A quick glance and her AMEX bill at the beginning of the movie made the audience cringe, and rightly so– $900 for a pair of high heels is a bit much!  Colin is more down to earth, but has a naivete about him that can come off as flippant or even ignorant.  Ultimately, what they are is human and flawed, and that makes the entire project feel so genuine.

They also had a level of humor and banter at some of the most difficult times.  One moment that sticks with me the most happened during their first attempt to do laundry in the tub.  It was the dead of winter, Colin was cleaning out the last of Michelle’s cosmetics, and there was a tub full of cold, dirty laundry with baking soda for detergent.  Michelle was curled up in bed sulking, listening to her husband and daughter walking on the laundry and laughing.  Instead of staying in bed, she got up, and with some coaxing was walking on the dirty laundry too, churning it clean– and they were having the time of their life!!  I grew to respect their love for each other, general optimism, open mindedness, and journey over the course of the year.

Above all, though, they had a message.  Not only are some of these sustainable life changes important for the planet, but they are also important for humanity.  Not to get too gooey about it all, but it sort of felt like the answer.  In an attempt to live sustainably, it is necessary to develop local eating habits, which leads to an interest in the community, and better health, and in this film a closer family, and a sense of the earth, and an ownership of you and your impact.  It also shows that there is a choice to be made.  We make them all the time, every day.  All they did, for one year, was make the most earth-friendly choices everyday.  Ultimately, what they realized is that those same choices were the most human-friendly too.  As they both said numerous times, it’s not about deprivation, it’s about exploration.

I’m going to make a really cheesy analogy now, but I can’t help it.  You know in the movie Contact, with Jodi Foster?  Ok, well at the end when she is dropping in the ball through the alien thing (god it’s been a long time since I’ve seen this movie)?  Right, well you know how she is strapped in the chair, and is rattling around, but when she gets out of the chair she is able to just float?  That is how I think we need to solve the environmental crisis that we are it:  we need to get out of the chair.

Or, something like that…  haha!  See the movie and let me know what you think!

Keep spinning.

-AB

Who actually uses them and who just puts them straight in the trash, umm recycling? How many stay on the font doorstop getting soggy, or get stored in a draw until the next one arrives to replace it. Even if you do use it, how many of the 2,000+ pages do you read? I am guessing that many of you are like me and never or at least rarely have a need for this cumbersome old technology. Think about it you want to find the phone number for the local vets, you have two choices.

1. Use that wonderfully simple white box on a well know search engine and type ‘vet in north London’ (or wherever local is to you). Select the first option and voila, you got it.

OR

2. Think about where you put that huge yellow thing about 4 months ago. Then go to the draw in the study, pull out all those unread letters and bank statements that is jamming it in and get your fingers around it a yank it out. Next find V, you calculate V is letter 22 in the alphabet, must be near the end. Great you landed on W must be close. You flick backwards, OMG how many window cleaners are there. Finally V, then V, E, luckily V is not a very large section so this is pretty fast. So you have found Vets. AAAAAAAGH. What’s with all those crazy adverts jumping out at me? You pick the first. No wait there must be one closer than that. Ok so lets start referring to all the addresses. Yes all 127 of them. Finally you have found one. now find a piece  of paper to jot the number down before jamming the phone book back in the draw and wedging it in place with the letters. Before you make the call you need a cup of tea to relax after the stress of the event.

Ok, so I may have been a little unfair on the big book but you have to admit there is a certain truth in my description.

Even if you do this once a month or even 10 times a month that is still a lot of printed pages you will never look at, which means a lot of waste.

But how much waste? According to the official yellow pages website (UK), they distribute 28.4 million copies. With a population of just over 60 million that’s nearly 1 for every other person (this includes babies and children). Then there is the Thomson Local (White pages in the USA). Another 22 million or 1 for every three people. So put together that’s nearly 1 phone book per person.

This is old technology. We can get faster more accurate results on our lap tops and mobile phones.

Remember to answer this question —–>

Of course they are going to keep printing them as long as companies keep paying for adds. But it seems to me that companies’ keep paying for adds because that’s what everyone else is doing. But this just means every company is lost among hundreds if not thousands of companies selling the same product or service. Using an Internet search engine allows us to define our search parameters. In a book we can look for Vet. On line you can search for what you want. EG. ‘Vets 24 hour emergency Hampstead heath, London. And guess what, the first option was exactly right. You can’t do that in 0.1 seconds (that’s the time Google said that it took) with a phonebook.

According to Banthephonebook.org up to 5 million trees are cut down to print the white pages in the USA every year. And the Yellow Pages is printed in more than 120 countries.

So what can you do to stop all this printing? I believe a good solution would be an Opt-in delivery program. Meaning, the directories are only delivered to homes and companies that request it. The idea comes from banthephonebook.org, which offers a petition for people to sign asking for an opt-in program.

Although afterd oing a bit of digging I found out www.banthephonebook.org was the creation of the ‘White Pages’. On their website it says ‘WhitePages launches BANTHEPHONEBOOK.ORG to educate consumers on the environmental impact of printing and distributing the white pages phonebook. Check out the site and sign the petition!’. Nowhere does it say what will be done with the petition.

Does this mean that this petition is just a big marketing campaign? I am interested to find out what is going to happen to this petition. Maybe someone from White Pages would like to answer this.

As I am not sure of the credibility of the above petition, I have created my own. Which can be found HERE, and can be signed by people from any country. So please join me to stop the wasteful printing of phonebooks.

Thanks for reading.

Ed

The Petition

Bit of a quicky this week.  School is back in session, and I can’t wait to relay info about my Global Warming class!  But first, I wanted to post about the latest and greatest idea from the White House– White Roofs.

I freaking love this idea.   The new Secretary of Energy, Dr. Steven Chu, is my hero.  Also I’ll just take this opportunity to plug Obama– how amazing it is to feel represented!

Ok, so on to this white roof proposal.  Paint your roof white.  That’s it!

This so called “cool roof” idea is rooted in the fundamentals of light and reflection.  Black absorbs light, transfering it to heat.  White reflects it.  Albedo is the scientific term for how reflective a surface is.  Glaciers, for example, have a high albedo.

Suposably, “lightening roofs and roads in urban environments would offset the global warming effects of all the cars in the world for 11 years.” (1)

Pretty cool stuff, huh?  Partially why I think this appeals to me so much is because it is our world, slant.  It is taking what we are used to, black roofs, and tilting it conceptually just enough so that it is purposeful.

It is also a quest for the whys.  Why are roofs black?  Can they be white?  What if they are?  What if everyone partook in a quest for the whys?  Like a 2 year old, discovering the world for the first time.  What if instead of answering, “I don’t know,” we answered, “let’s find out”?  If enough changes are made simply with the environment in mind, well, I don’t know what would happen, but it makes me feel optimistic, excited, and yes, hopeful.

Let me know what you think!

Keep spinning.

-AB

For a little idiom 101– a red herring refers to a tactic of misdirection.  For example, a murder mystery might overemphasize one character with the intention of under emphasizing the murderer.

In this case, I believe that this-is-not-a-plastic-bag bags have become a red herring.  It’s not that I don’t think this is a good movement.  I do.  Yes, bring reusable bags!  Yes, minimize a superfluous waste!  Hooray!!!  It’s that it feels like nothing else is getting done because of the inflated amount of attention that gets drawn to this one, tiny topic.

Rather than using the conceptual knowledge– move away from superfluous non-recyclable non-reusable packaging– people appear to be stuck only on the move away from plastic bags.  It’s like a fixation.  In the mean time, nothing is being done about the way food is packaged.  Nothing is being done about the way drinks, pens, toys, toilet paper, cleaning products, cameras, and on, and on, are packaged.  It is as if, because the items are in a reusable bag, the items themselves are not wasteful.

The reality is, however, even if you use a plastic bag, over 98% of the waste generated comes from what is inside the bag.  Bob Lilienfeld, editor of the Use Less Stuff report, in a August 7, 2009 interview with NPR said that, “the bag is not the environmental bogey-person that everybody thinks it is.  If you look at the entire grocery package that you bought, the bag may account for 1 to 2 percent of the environmental impact.” (Tovia Smith, How Green Are Reusable Bags?)

Again, I am in no way advocating the use of plastic bags, but what I am saying is that maybe it is time to move on.  Or, if it’s not time yet, it is at least time to multi-task.  Not to get nutty with the fish analogies, but I think of it like “teach a person to fish and he/she will eat for a lifetime…”  You get the idea.  (On a tangent, PC and grammatically correct proverbs just don’t have that same ring to them…)

San Fransisco recently banned plastic bags.  I think this is great!  Let’s put a lid on this issue once and for all, and start to tackle the next issue:  like packaging in general, or better yet, plastics!!

Let me know what you think.

Keep spinning.

-AB

• UK 9.66 tonnes
• USA 19.7 tonnes
• Mexico 4.5 tonnes
• China 4.57 tonnes
But hey who wants be average?

To work out your carbon footprint you have to look at everything in your life and work out how much CO2 that emits. So that includes transport, heating, holidays, food, water, electricity and a whole wealth of other things. Now to try and figure all that out! You probably just said to yourself something like, no way, or you must be out of your mind. It’s pretty much impossible and anyway and we all have far better things to be doing with our lives.

CO2 per capita by country

This is when we turn to Carbon Calculators. Yes you guessed it, a calculator that works out your carbon footprint. Brilliant. There goes all the work. Well, not exactly, you still have to fill in some information. There are loads of them online, just type in Carbon Calculator into Google.
Simply fill in the information and it will work out your carbon footprint. Now you can see you Carbon Footprint. I used the calculatore at carbonfootprint.com and my Carbon Footprint is,
4.04 tonnes of CO2 per year.

Why not find your carbon footprint and post it as a comment at the end of this post. (and lets be honest about this) Remember you get the results instantly, which actually makes it kind of fun.
Great! So I now have a number, but what do I do with it. Now I try to reduce that number. I do things like turn the lights and appliances off, change my electricity to an Eco tariff, recycle more, use less, drive less, and walk more. Then I go back in 6 months or a year and see if my footprint has reduced. I have been doing this for a while now and have been reducing it every time. But it can be hard to find a place to start reducing your footprint. This is where a good carbon calculator helps. In your results you will get a breakdown of where you CO2 emissions are coming from. You just find the area in your life that has the greatest amount of emissions and work out how to reduce it. So if its your car then try car pooling (sharing lifts to work etc) or biking to the shops, or even take PUBLIC TRANSPORT. Scary I know, but it really isn’t that bad once or twice a week!

We all need to have a target, right. For an example UK the government has set a target get personal Carbon Footprints to 8.5 by 2015. That’s 75% of the current average. Which is less than a 4% reduction each year.

But in reality this is nowhere near enough. For everyone on the planet to be living sustainable it is thought that our carbon footprints need to be less than 2 tonnes of CO2 per person. Now that’s less than 20% of the UK average today and less than 10% of the USA average. The ideal Carbon footprint is a subject of great debate and the is not one single number that has been agreed on. The IPCC of the USA has a target of 80% reductions on 1990 figures by 2050. New zealand has a ’20 by 2020′ idea. This means to reduce carbon footprints by 20% by 2020. Although this doesn’t come close to the 2 tonne footprint, it is a goal. I however believe it should be 40% by 2020 for every nation. This is a target that we should all adopt. Of course for those of us with already low carbon footprints this is going to be a whole lot harder, but possible none the less.
This really shows how screwed we are at the moment. We need to do more than just change the light-bulbs to CFL’s.We really do need to make a bigger effort to change, fundamental change. We need to support the new technologies in transport, electricity and buildings. Once we have mastered the small efforts we must not stop there but continue tackling this huge issue.  I will write a blog about the 2 tonne idea soon.
So that’s the basics of Carbon Foot printing. Why not go and find out your carbon footprint now then post your results at the end of this blog. Post your country and your personal Carbon footprint.
I hope this helped.
Thanks for reading.

Ed

Ps. if you have questions then please post them in the comments and I will respond.

Ok, let’s go back 200 million years.  Well… ok wait, scratch that.  Let’s talk carbon cycle first.

Remember earth cycles and systems?  You probably learned about them in Earth Science class in elementary school and 9th grade.  Maybe you even did a project about photosynthesis and respiration?  I remember coloring in trees and arrows– so many arrows!  Well, the carbon cycle in its basic form looks like this:

(Thank you Earth and System Sciences power point; Spring 2009; Dr. Padilla)

Like the above image shows, the earth draws down carbon dioxide (CO2) from the atmosphere in a couple of different ways– through photosynthesis (plants) and the ocean (sedimentation, shells and coral).  Now, I knew about plant respiration using carbon dioxide to create food, but the ocean drawing down CO2 was news to me.  The ocean literally absorbs carbon dioxide directly from the atmosphere through a series of biological and chemical processes (that’s vague I know, but it’s OK for these purposes).  This dissolved CO2 is then used by animals to make shells and coral, and in turn creates sediments on the ocean floor.

Alright, this is a cycle, so there’s an up arrow too.  Volcanoes, animal respiration, decomposition, and combustion all pump CO2 back up into the atmosphere.  Combustion includes the burning of wood and coal, and the use of fuel.

Right, so back to 200 million years ago.  It was hot.  And not like Texas in the Summer hot, like Texas in the Summer on the Sun hot.  There was no north pole, no south pole– well, I mean, there were poles, but they weren’t cold.  There were no ice caps so the ocean was hundreds of feet above the current sea level.  There was also a ton of CO2 in the atmosphere.  It is now widely agreed that the level of CO2 in the atmosphere is directly related to the climate.  Ok, so then how did we get to the current climate conditions?  Well, in short, the Earth kept spinning.  Over time, the plants that covered the continents drew down the carbon dioxide through respiration and photosynthesis.  As the plants died off, and as the Earth changed, the now decomposed plants were pushed down down into the crust and became fossil fuels, like coal and oil.

All of this info is leading to the one main point:  when we talk about global warming, we are talking about 200 million years worth of carbon dioxide being pumped back into the atmosphere in less than 100 years.

Simply put, coal, gas and oil is stored carbon which to took millions and millions of years to be collected.  We are burning them, putting that CO2 back in the atmosphere at a rate that is totally unmanageable for the Earth to sustain. We are steeling from millions of years of careful balance (there’s a great film about this:  Home by Yann Arthus-Bertrand. You can watch it for free in HD at http://www.youtube.com/homeproject).

Now for the upside.  1. we can stop pumping all of that CO2 back into the atmosphere.  2. we can also do things to encourage drawing the CO2 back down.  So, not only are these climate changes possible to stop, they are theoretically reversible.  What are some people doing?  Carbon off-setting, like planting trees.  That’s a big one.  There is a website called Erase Carbon Footprint where you can put in the amount of CO2 that you used on, let’s say a plane trip, and then donate the amount of money that it takes to plant the number of tree to counter balance that time.  I really really like that idea.  There are also many budding “carbon sink” ideas that are being implemented.  There is some concern with the Oceans pH levels when drawing down carbon dioxide, but ideas including restoring and growing coral reefs which would use the carbon to grow.  I think that there is a lot more research to be done about the ocean and pH levels before we go nuts, though.  There is SOOOO much exciting and current information on carbon off-setting, it’s going to need to be its own blog.  Let me know if you have anything to add!

But first, here’s my own little invention idea for carbon offsetting.  This would be for roofs that are not able to be made “green” and I think of it primarily in an urban setting.  I call it Tree, and it involves three parts: Leaf, Root, and Stem.  Leaf would be a large, thin, permeable and translucent storage of chlorophyll (or algae).  Root would provide the water needed, and Stem would help to power it.  The idea behind it is that it would increase the general surface area where plant respiration could take place.  Really I would love it to be just chlorophyll, but the technology needed to replicate photosynthesis outside of plants hasn’t been developed yet.  I think that algae would work, though, at least in the the sense that algae would resperate.  So Leaf is busy breathing in CO2, using water (from Root), and sunlight, and breathing out O2.  Haha, so just a budding idea, but it’s fun to think about!  Let me know what you think too!

Keep spinning.

-AB

We seem to have wars for everything at the moment. We have a war on terror, war on crime, war on drugs, war on global warming. The thing is, this so called war on terror which is creating a load of wars is having a massive effect on the war on global warming, does this mean we need a war on the war on global warming to make the war on terror eco friendly? First of all let me just say making war eco friendly is no solution to any of these problems.

Ok so all these wars are not only killing thousands of people directly but also contributing massively to global warming, which has the potential to kill or at least displace millions more. We will discuss all that in another post.

So how much CO2 (the stuff which is creating Global warming and Climate Change) does something like the Iraq war generate?

Well between March 2003 and March 2008 the war was responsible for at least 141 million tons of CO2. Now that sounds a lot doesn’t it, but how much is that really? How about 25 million more cars on the road. Or, if it were a country it would generate about the same amount of CO2 as New Zealand.  Or more than 100 million return flights between London and New York. So if nothing more, stopping the war could offset a lot of shopping trips in either city. (Now that’s an economy booster).

Now this war is generating a lot of CO2 and to do that it needs to use a whole load of fossil fuels. 4 billion gallons of fuel to be precise (that’s how much the US military has purchased).  Burning these fuels has directly produced nearly 39 million metric tons of CO2. But hold on how does all that fuel get to where it needs to be. Yes you got it; it takes fuel to deliver fuel. In fact transporting fuel uses about the same amount than is actually delivered. Therefore your can double the above figure to about 90 million tons of CO2. With one of the major factors of wars being fossil fuels it seems completely outrages that the fight for the fuel is using so much.

Throughout the Iraq war there have been many cases of oil well fires and pipeline bombings. This dramatically increases the amount of carbon emissions. It is estimated that since 2003 these fires have emitted 15 million tons of CO2.

There are also many unquantifiable emissions created from war. These are things like the development and deployment of explosives and chemicals. Not to mention the fact than when you blow things up, they need to be rebuilt. This uses a lot of cement, which in its production is one of the world’s largest emitters of CO2.

Ok so that’s a lot of CO2 being created. Now, to do all of this the US government has had to spend a whole lot of cash. In 2008 it broke the $600 billion mark. Now can you imagine what could happen if that money was spent on renewable energy research and development. After all in 2006 the US spent more on the Iraq war than the entire world spent on investment in renewable energy. (http://www.greenpeace.org/raw/content/international/press/reports/future-investment.pdf) That’s hard for me to get my head round. Renewable energy is something that will positively effect us all, how is it that one war is worth more than that!

That $600 billion could have been used to build 9000 wind farms. That’s would be enough to generate 25% of the USA’s energy needs. Imagine that. Stop wasting oil on the war and getting 25% of energy from a renewable source. Try passing that through congress. I don’t think they’ll go for it, it makes too much sense.

Obama has committed to spending $150 billion over 10 years to advance the next generation of green energy technology and infrastructure. Now that is fantastic, but if you consider the US spends nearly that much on the war in Iraq in just 10 months, (http://change.gov/agenda/economy_agenda) its clear that there is not enough focus on a sustainable future.

So as you can see, war is not only a mindless money eating killing machine but it has massive byproducts. One of which is a huge contribution to Global Warming.

Now, I focused on the USA and their involvement in the Iraq war, but I am in no way saying this is the only war or the only country committing these climate crimes. Every war and every country involved in a war is having a negative effect on the planet. What if ‘climate crime’ became an international offense. So individuals, corporations and governments could be tried for causing inexcusable and avoidable ‘climate crimes’. Climate crime could become a war crime and added to the 1996 war crimes act. Governments and leaders found guilty of this crime will have to repay the climate debt through carbon offset or passing new sustainable energy bills. If they have money for war they must have money to develop a sustainable future. Ok so I went off on a tangent. But you get the idea.

Just a imagine a world where all countries followed Costa Rica’s lead and stopped investing in armies and put the money towards nature conservation. This would be a true Global solution to Global Warming.

Thanks for reading.

Ed