The first rule of sustainability is to align with natural forces, or at least not try to defy them.
The most unrealistic person in the world is the cynic, not the dreamer. Hope only makes sense when it doesn’t make sense to be hopeful.
Our goal is to present climate science and solutions in language that is accessible and compelling to the broadest audience, from ninth graders to pipe fitters, from graduate students to farmers.
Molecules of methane that make their way into the atmosphere create a warming effect up to thirty-four times stronger than carbon dioxide over a one-hundred-year time horizon.
Girls’ education, it turns out, has a dramatic bearing on global warming. Women with more years of education have fewer, healthier children and actively manage their reproductive health.
If you do not provide your body with true nourishment, it becomes obese, diseased, and disabled. If a farmer does not provide nourishment to the soil, it becomes infertile, diseased, and deadened.
If cattle were their own nation, they would be the world’s third-largest emitter of greenhouse gases.
Today, 314,000 wind turbines supply nearly 4 percent of global electricity. And it will soon be much more. Ten million homes in Spain alone are powered by wind. Investment in offshore wind was $29.9 billion in 2016, 40 percent greater than the prior year.
Education also equips women to face the most dramatic climatic changes. A 2013 study found that educating girls “is the single most important social and economic factor associated with a reduction in vulnerability to natural disasters.
Research to date suggests silvopasture far outpaces any grassland technique. That is because silvopastoral systems sequester carbon in both the biomass aboveground and the soil below. Pastures that are strewn or crisscrossed with trees sequester five to ten times as much carbon as those of the same size that are treeless. Moreover, because the livestock yield on a silvopasture plot is higher.
When you add up the impact on carbon sequestration and storage, forest protection and tropical and temperate forest restoration together are the most powerful solution available to address global warming.
Bloomberg predicts that wind energy will be the lowest-cost energy globally by 2030.
Rice provides a full one-fifth of calories consumed worldwide, more than wheat or corn, and is the essential staple in the daily diet of 3 billion people, many of them poor and food insecure.
In 2015, Brazil earned the final $100 million payment of a $1 billion grant from Norway, which had set up the fund in 2008 to reward countries that achieved targeted goals of reducing their rate of deforestation.
A single rotation of the blades generates the electricity for one household’s daily use.
Similarly, a 2016 World Resources Institute report analyzes a variety of possible dietary modifications and finds that “ambitious animal protein reduction” – focused on reducing overconsumption of animal-based foods in regions where people devour more than 60 grams of protein and 2,500 calories per day – holds the greatest promise for ensuring a sustainable future for global food supply and the planet.
As Zen master Thich Nhat Hanh has said, making the transition to a plant-based diet may well be the most effective way an individual can stop climate change. Recent research suggests he is right: Few climate solutions of this magnitude lie in the hands of individuals or are as close as the dinner plate.
Yet a third of the food raised or prepared does not make it from farm or factory to fork. That number is startling, especially when paired with this one: Hunger is a condition of life for nearly 800 million people worldwide. And this one: The food we waste contributes 4.4 gigatons of carbon dioxide equivalent into the atmosphere each year – roughly 8 percent of total anthropogenic greenhouse gas emissions.
In too many places, kitchen efficiency has become a lost art.
Research by Stanford neuroscientist Andrew Huberman upends the idea that beliefs determine what we do or what we can do. It is the opposite. Beliefs do not change our actions. Actions change our beliefs.
Too often, however, tree planting requires taking over land in the South to offset emissions created by a more affluent and industrialized North. In this sense, it is no different from prior colonization visited upon Africa, South America, and Asia over the centuries.