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Great post here on the topic of changes you can make in your own lives.

A lot of people ask me how they can live more sustainably, and help combat global environmental issues like climate change in their own lives. Here’s my advice.

Knowing that people are very busy, and most don’t really want long, complicated lists of things to do, here are my suggestions…

Source: So, What Can I Do?

(No hard frost yet.)

We watched Before the Flood on friday night. Leonardo Di Caprio’s new movie on climate change. It contains some powerful imagery of the effects of climate change that are happening right now. To see the tar sands in alberta or a mountaintop removal in west virgina is staggering.

How can I take action? I think I’ve taken many of the easy (lightbulbs) and privileged (efficient cars) routes. I offset all of our airplane travel through Nature Conservancy. So what’s next?

Beef.

Beef clearly has a bigger impact on the environment than other forms of protein, and the movie presents a number of compelling examples such as the equivalency of eating a 1/2lb. burger vs. driving your prius 50 miles.

Here is one news article from a couple of years ago: Giving up beef will reduce carbon footprint more than cars

Beef’s environmental impact dwarfs that of other meat including chicken and pork, new research reveals, with one expert saying that eating less red meat would be a better way for people to cut carbon emissions than giving up their cars.

So, here we go…

Reducing humanity’s carbon pollution will certainly be logistically difficult, but its roots are essentially blameless – by the time climate change was a problem, nations had built their economies on cheap fossil fuel – and conceptually simple: pollute less. It’s comforting to think that, if humanity can fix Earth’s climate, nature’s problems will be also be solved.

But that’s not the case.

Source: Why we need to stop thinking so much about climate c…

I mentioned in an earlier post that I was currently digging through Countdown by Alan Weisman. It should be abundantly clear that there is so much more to protecting the earth and environment than climate change alone.

The author nails it in this final quote, we have trouble debating even the most conceptually simple problems, let alone beginning to tackle the reduction of our footprint on complex ecosystems.

This is a great list of ideas for reducing your carbon footprint from the New York Times:

Global climate: it’s complicated. Any long-term solution will require profound changes in how we generate energy. At the same time, there are everyday things that you can do to reduce your personal contribution to a warming planet. Here are seven simple guidelines on how your choices today affect the climate tomorrow.

A colleague of mine generously lent her Nissan Leaf for us to test drive for the week. We need to answer two questions before we head down the electric car route:

1. Will the range be enough for daily driving in our two car household.
2. Is it cleaner than a hybrid or small diesel.

The answer to first question seems to be an unequivocal yes. Total daily driving for each of us is about 8 miles. Total miles driven in the household each day – about 16. It’s not much. We’ve ended each day with plenty of range on the Leaf. We can’t envision a day where it would be a problem.

The answer to question #2 is a little more difficult. I’ve heard anecdotally about the relative cleanliness of electricity generation vs. burning automotive fuel. I discovered one paper so far in my not-exhaustive research: A Roadmap to Climate Friendly Cars: 2013

Basically, in Minnesota if you don’t take in to account the manufacturing of the car, it is cleaner than the next cleanest option (a plug-in prius). If you do take in to account the manufacturing, it is less clean.

However, I imagine you can tip that balance on an individual basis by installing rooftop solar panels.

If we head down this path, my dear readers, you can be sure that I will blog about it here in excruciating detail… more to come!

Ninety-seven percent of scientists agree: #climate change is real, man-made and dangerous. Read more: OFA.BO/gJsdFp

— Barack Obama (@BarackObama) May 16, 2013

It’s going to take a lot more than tweets to get new policy on climate change. but there is hope. You probably read the guardian’s recent post that 97% of scientific papers on climate change agree that it is man-made. You’ve also probably read that we’ve passed 400ppm of CO2 in the atmosphere.

Here’s hoping that the next 30 years brings serious and sustained action on climate. Time to vote the deniers out of office… Glenn Gruenhagen of Glencoe – I’m looking at you for starters. “United Nations fraud and lie”? Conspiracy theory much?

“We are not saints like those Scandinavians — we were lapping up fossil fuels, buying bigger cars and homes, very American,” said Eamon Ryan, who was Ireland’s energy minister from 2007 to 2011. “We just set up a price signal that raised significant revenue and changed behavior. Now, we’re smashing through the environmental targets we set for ourselves.”

Carbon Taxes Make Ireland Even Greener