Being Green

I watched this video by Just Have a Think’s, Dave Borlace.

Just Have a Think Independent Youtube Channel dedicated to Climate Change issues and mitigation technologies.

I watch most of his presentations. They are easy to digest, and if you skip past the Climate Emergency narrative then there is always something to take away either in terms of awareness of what you do and how it may be affecting the environment or just some whizzy new tech that at some point may start to make it past the vested interests of the fossil fuel industries into the mainstream.

There are some mixed messages in the paragraph above. I caveat that as long as you can skip past the Climate Emergency narrative, there is always something to learn but it is indicative of scepticism. But then go on to say something that looks like I’m not into fossil fuels for the long-term future … what’s going on?

Linked below is a paper from Bjorn Lomborg, wikipedia.org Bjorn Lomborg

Sciencedirect.com Bjorn Lomborg Paper

Well, the thing is, I think both polarised sides of the climate argument have now become industries upon which livelihoods depend, and therefore a certain amount of objectivity has been made absent by default. I’m not going to reiterate either side’s arguments here. There are so many papers, presentations, and arguments, and most of us know them all, as they are on perpetual repeat in all forms of media. What this overload does do is make making informed choices difficult. The advice in the Just Have a Think presentation is sound, however, only in so far as it is affordable. Getting all hair shirt and flagellating yourself is bad for you, bad for your mental health, and probably pretty bad for people around you. You will become an idolater, within an ideology, under the auspices of ideologues.

When I was younger, and before the internet became a thing, I’d been pretty much indoctrinated into the Global Warming cult and the fear of the `End of Days’. However, over time apocalyptic warnings came and went and things stayed `sort of the same', with a few aberrations here and there. Climate Alarmists (just using this for ID purposes) would cite the aberrations as examples of extreme weather events and a symptom of climate change. Climate Change sceptics or deniers (just using this for ID purposes), would suggest that records don’t go back far enough and there are no guarantees that extreme but unrecorded events haven’t always taken place throughout history, sunspots, interglacial periods etc.

So where does that leave me personally? It’s interesting, and the reason I posted the link to the Just Have A Think Video, is because having sat through it, I find that likely as not the indoctrination into the Climate Alarmist branch in practical terms has been stronger than the scepticism but at a subliminal level. Put another way, I've responded to fear of the future at my/our own cost.

What does that mean? In simple terms, almost all the carbon footprint mitigation measures you can take on a day-to-day basis … I/we do.

For instance, nothing sits on standby, we have solar panels and battery (we feed the grid, and the grid dumps excess energy into our smart battery), we don’t waste food, we upcycle, we compost, we volunteer (though that’s more to do with litter picking than climate per se, though nowadays oddly the two seem to have been conflated). We do have four vehicles, the camper still lives, we have the big gas guzzler because it’s still very useful in this part of the world to have four-wheel drive and a shed load of torque and room for guests from far away (seven seat XC90), The Alfa (which is hopefully going soon), and Amanda’s latest addition a little Mazda 2 that sips fuel. We both use it for the nipping about locally. All our lights except in the bathroom are LED -The bathroom light fittings and lamps need to be replaced to move to LED. We have clay cored radiators, and a Defra approved wood-burner, and only burn arboricultural waste (that’s all the grotty offcuts from forestry operations, kiln-dried, and we use it sparingly). We don’t burn coal. We have also replaced all our external double-glazing for a Low-Iron glass, warm seal type. We have also messed about with our loft insulation and plan to do more up the loft and have even thought about losing 50mm off the inside of the outer facing walls to add more insulation.

So, all this said, clearly, I’m a Greeny through and through.

Well, no, not really. I do practical things to save money, to reduce our bills and keep our home environment stable, as much for my abundant house plants as for economics or the external environment. That isn’t to say I don’t care about the environment, clearly, I do ... I go and pick up other peoples discarded litter from beaches, Rhyne’s, Lanes and paths. We garden for insects as much as for ourselves (apparently the entire insect apocalypse thing has been equally overblown in the media over the last decade, more about that another time).

In the paper linked above `Welfare in the 21st century: Increasing development, reducing inequality, the impact of climate change, and the cost of climate policies.’ There is a counter-narrative to the climate emergency narrative and somewhere between these poles is sanity. Somewhere between these positions is common sense. In essence, people care less about the environment than they do about education and health. If you were to believe the mainstream media the environment is the greatest cause for concern.

 

I am not a Greeny by ideology, but I get that in previous centuries we extracted 220million years’ worth of fallen and compacted trees and burnt them in furnaces to create the modern world and that in many places that burning of coal still goes on. I get that Carbon Dioxide hangs around in the atmosphere for a long time. I also get from an arboricultural perspective that trees are carbon sinks, and of all the plant forms on land they are the largest and support the largest eco-systems individually and as a copse or wood (of any size). Caveat this may not be the case in a plantation … in fact the exact opposite in terms of monoculture.

 

If you take those two bits of knowledge (atmospheric carbon, plants as sequestration devices) and add in the compound word bio-diversity you move in the direction of understanding carbon offsetting. But, not really, and the reason for not really, is because trees are only a tiny part of the bio-diversity part of the equation. And Biodiversity is a stupid term because it tells you nothing. It’s a trendy word, another catch-all that manages to miss the point.

 

Biodiversity; It implies that if you are bio-diverse you have a great many species. Frankly so what. What you are actually interested in is Bio-Mass. Never have two terms gotten in such a mess.

 

Bio-Mass if you ask people about it, would relate to boilers and energy crops (of the seven times it's mentioned in the linked paper, it is in regards to fuel).

 

Bio-diversity. A cynic would suggest that the word diversity has been pushed front and centre just because it allows the word diversity to be used more often. And is a useful way of leveraging opinion about `human diversity' as a parallel to natures raw diversity, by indicating that natural diversity and human diversity are the same things. There are parallels, they aren’t the same thing. But from an identity politics, perspective binding climate to social justice using a common framework of words is a useful strategy (I may have over-thought this).

 

Bio-mass, on the other hand, is the sum of living and dead organic matter, all that matter is sequestered carbon. A tree has roots, those roots are exponentially extended by mycelial structures (Mycorrhiza). In the soil, about and around a root system there is a plethora of sub-soil species from bacteria up the chain to invertebrates and beyond … it’s quite diverse, but for our purposes it also contains mass. The mass is sequestered from the exchange of gases, water and minerals in the soil and above the soil by living organisms and natural processes such as rainfall, weathering, birth and death. These natural cycles sequester and diffuse CO2 from the soil and the atmosphere, it’s called the Carbon Cycle.

 

What happens if you create vast mono-culture crops? You lose biodiversity in an area. But in relative terms you still have biodiversity generally, after all, all the insects that have come to our gardens (front and back) over the seven years we have been here, had to come from somewhere else. They didn’t spontaneously generate by an act of god in the presence of Daffodils or Dahlias.

 

So, what’s really happened in our imaginary monoculture? It’s lost bio-mass in relative terms.

 

While we have been burning coal, we have also been changing soil use, creating more monocultures, losing biomass and losing the ability to store CO2, in all areas from plants in all locations on land and to some extent in the seas, but also from the Chitin in exoskeletons of insects and arthropods to bones and flesh of all living creatures in a given area. When you cut down a tree, you lose a lot more than a tree above ground. Beneath the ground, the change would be slower, but you are still likely to suffer a net loss in time.

 

If you say what I have said above, you will, I will be pilloried because it suggests climate change denialism/scepticism. However, I do believe we have and can change the climate and that global climate changes can influence weather locally, non-specifically, and randomly, be that storms or drought and every permutation in between. What irks me is this fixation on emissions, when from what I can see and find there is very little on biomass in terms of all up annual and decadal net sequestration (in our context, I’m only talking about terrestrial biomass, I have no clue as to the real state of our seas and oceans). All living things are made of carbon in our context. And the worlds great natural carbon sinks are being eaten away (habitat loss), biomass loss. So, while you can do things at home to offset your `Carbon Footprint’, in relative terms, until you are given explicit instruction about natural carbon sinks, you are barely doing half the job required.

 

I look around our town at the vast areas of garden land concreted, paved or gravelled over and think about all those people who haven’t in any way shape or form been persuaded by the green argument to assist the atmosphere by growing stuff, or they have been confused by the messaging solely orientated to reducing emissions, and how putting up a bug hotel is going to save the planet (without supporting infrastructure -plants- a bug hotel is about as much use as a chocolate fireguard).

 

I have no scientific background and I could be so far off the mark here as to be laughable, but having read, having watched, having listened and thought I can’t help but think that climate alarmism isn’t working, and that (excuse the conflation) the same tactic of ramped up fear around Covid, demonstrates that people who are put in fear do less positive things not more, and in some cases actually, push back because they have lost hope. This all said the lifestyle changes in the Just Have a Think video presentation, will save you money in the longer term, and perhaps if it makes you feel a bit warm and fuzzy, you will do more. Positive reinforcement as opposed to the negativity of lost hope.