Individual action – Planethugger

How can I vote for the planet?

We are having a horrible climate crisis of a summer, here in Canada and around the world. These disasters are right in our faces, and yet we are still not seeing the urgent government action we need to keep this planet habitable. This federal election is our chance to be heard, not just by voting but by telling politicians and political parties on campaign that the majority of Canadians want serious action on the climate emergency now. We are running out of time to act.

So – a few thoughts on what we can do

Talk to politicians, door knockers, survey-takers – and ask questions about climate action. Demand action on fossil fuel projects, greenhouse gas emissions, preservation of green spaces, and more. Make your concerns heard – don’t just listen to them. Plus, talk to friends, family and anyone about the climate crisis and environmental issues. We can change the conversation!

Demonstrate to make your concerns heard! 350.org is planning a second nationwide demonstration next Wednesday, September 8th. The theme is “Canada is still on fire! Act like it!”

There are close to 50 actions happening across the country, so there’s a good chance one is happening near you! Click here to get more information, and the map showing where the actions will take place. You can click the one closest to you and sign up to attend. (Hope to see lots of you at Queen’s Park for the Toronto action!) We can make sure that climate is an issue in this election, especially with the UN Climate Change Conference/COP26 coming up in Glasgow in the fall.

Voting is important – don’t let someone else decide your government for you! Here are some basics to help you vote, and vote in an informed way:

The government site which will allow you to check that you’re registered, and figure out where and when you can vote is here. You can vote at an advanced poll, at an Elections Canada Office, by mail or at regular polls on voting day, September 20th.

How do you decide who to vote for?

Probably not from the ads! Here is the WikiHow method – step by step on how to gather information and make the decision. Also, I recommend trying the quiz at Vote Compass/Canada Votes 2021, which compares your opinions with those of the political parties, and comes up with an idea of which matches you the best. Fun and interesting.

For information on the different party platforms, click here: Conservative, Green, Liberal, and NDP. It is worth checking out GreenPac, a non-profit organization which monitors candidates, and in mid-September will be endorsing candidates who have shown environmental leadership.

This site shows national trends based on polls, but will also help you see how things look now in your home riding, to help with your voting decision.

Learn a bit more about the leaders here.

The Toronto Star’s quick explainer on the four main issues is here. (Including the climate crisis!)

Here’s what the Globe and Mail is saying about the campaigns. You can follow politics on the CBC here, including a daily newsletter you can sign up for.

But whatever you do, VOTE!

And pass this blog along to other people!

Time for action – yes, again!

With the pandemic emergency and lockdown, it’s been quite a while since I last wrote a blog. And although it may be temporary, for the moment Covid-19 seems mostly under control here in Canada. (I hope your experience of the pandemic, lockdowns etc. was/is not too terrible!) But the real emergency, threatening all life on the planet, is still the climate emergency. And I am going to tell you what you can do about it this week.

*https://toronto.citynews.ca/video/2021/07/20/wildfire-smoke-brings-hazy-skies-poor-air-quality-to-toronto/*

Why now? The climate crisis is not just here, it’s right here in our faces. On Tuesday, July 20th, Toronto, along with much of the rest of Canada, had seriously toxic air – for Toronto, the second worst air quality of any city in the world, identified as ‘unhealthy’. (More info on toxic haze from forest fires here if you need it.)

FYI: I recommend that everyone download the excellent IQAir app to display and track local air quality on your phone along with your weather widget. It is a fantastic app, and very transparent about its data.

*Toronto from my deck today – level 125 according to IQAir, ‘unhealthy for sensitive groups’ Photo/MCM*

My other scary in-person climate crisis moment recently was in Killarney, Ontario in June. In the middle of what should have been the North’s notoriously horrible blackfly season, there were no bugs, due to a drought. This is unheard of. Great for hikers – not so good for the birds!

On a lighter note, I have to include a link to Wade Hemsworth’s funny 1949 song and short NFB animated film about the experience of blackflies in Northern Ontario, here, in case you haven’t seen it. Even nightmarish clouds of biting insects are an essential part of the Canadian experience – cultural and environmental. We need them!

The climate crisis is actually here – now! And our government is carrying on with business as usual. A majority of Canadians see this climate crisis and want action now, before it’s too late. Trudeau talks about problems, but does very little. So we need to get out there in numbers and demand that the government act like it’s an emergency, to reduce emissions and at least slow down climate change.

This week you can join a protest that’s going on across Canada organized by 350.org, an international climate change action group. Their message:

***https://below2c.org/2021/07/message-to-justin-trudeau-canadas-on-fire-act-like-it/***

On Thursday, July 29th, people from every part of the country are organizing and going to their MP’s local office (or one nearby) to present a pledge, and possibly a fire extinguisher to the MP if possible. This means you can join a national protest in your own neighbourhood. What could be more important than that? Click here to find a local action near you, or set one up in your riding yourself.

No one can say this is not their issue, with an endless stream of worsening climate disasters in the news – and in our home cities! And you will feel better when you have done something positive about it, however small. Plus – this is an easy one: just go to this link, RSVP to your closest event, and show up with a sign! (Or sign up at the same link to organize an event in your own riding.) Don’t wait for someone else to do what we all need to do. And do tell all your friends, family and neighbours about this. A large turnout will make this more effective. We all need to add our voices!

Photo/MCM
Image/Sheree Tams

And finally, I have gone ahead and registered and am organizing an action at the Davenport riding office of Julie Dzerowicz, near Dufferin and Bloor. More info here.

So – you should join me if it’s at all possible! And I could definitely use some help preparing for this. Get in touch! As well, I will be handing out buttons like in the photo above.

350.org –
On Fire Art Tool Kit

It’s an emergency – let’s act like it! On Thursday!

Can we visit the world without destroying it?

Some facts on flying

The view over Da Nang, Vietnam on a sunny day. Yes, that is pollution! Photo MM

A walk in the rain forest in Borneo
Photo/LTS

I’ll be up front about it: I am a very imperfect environmentalist, and the worst damage I do to the planet is traveling in planes. (Anyone I know on Facebook is well aware of this!) I have always wanted to travel, ever since high school when I started studying a lot of French and Spanish. I worked for an airline and travel agencies. Now I’m retired, and one of the main things I want to do is travel! But there is no doubt it is bad, as we see in the news every day. Here’s today’s update on global heating. Anyway, this blog is the result of much guilty thought and research .

The ocean absorbs much of the extra heat from climate change. Hotter oceans kill coral, among other things. More on coral bleaching and photo credit :
https://www.cnn.com/2017/04/10/asia/great-barrier-reef-coral-bleaching/index.html.

In this blog I am going to try to find some basic facts about greenhouse gas and other emissions from travel, and look at some ways to mitigate the damage. I’m trying to be brief here, so there will be links to articles with more detail – for those who want it. But there are some big issues here, so the blog may be longer than usual!

The first part is easy to figure out. Biking and walking don’t create greenhouse gases. It’s that simple. We should walk and bike as much as possible – which will be very different for people in different circumstances. However every bit counts, as this article points out. But it won’t get you to Europe from North America!

Bikes are good once you get there, though! Photo/Flickr

Note: New research is showing how damaging particulate air pollution is for city dwellers – you can monitor air pollution where you live with this app, (highly recommended!) This article shows that you can substantially reduce exposure by taking side streets and going through parks.

Emissions from flying are much harder to calculate (See this academic article for principles) due to differences in plane models, what’s on the plane at takeoff, how many passengers share responsibility for the emissions, the flight path, even the weather, and possibly who runs the site you get your data from. But here are some basic facts (I hope!) and links.

Flying requires huge amounts of energy – which we tend to forget because it’s so common. Think about this: two or three people can push a car out of a ditch. They can move it! Now think about how many (very tall!) people it would take to lift a 767 full of people, bags and fuel, etc. You burn a lot more fuel, and the emissions go directly into the upper atmosphere, where they do the most damage.

This, from the BBC online magazine Science Focus, gives a decent comparison:

A Boeing 747 uses 7840kg of aviation fuel for the take-off, climb and descent portions of the flight and these account for about 250km. For journeys longer than that, the plane will use 10.1kg for each additional kilometre under typical cruising conditions. So to fly from Heathrow to Edinburgh (530km) uses 10,668kg of fuel, which releases a little over 33 tonnes of CO2.
Whereas a Ford Mondeo 1.8 TDCi emits 151g of CO2 per km and covers 650km to reach Edinburgh. That works out to be 98kg for a single passenger, compared to 79kg per person for the Jumbo, assuming it carries its full complement of 416 passengers. But you could drive 336 cars to Edinburgh for the same CO2 as one plane.
https://www.sciencefocus.com/future-technology/how-many-cars-equal-the-co2-emissions-of-one-plane/

Again, tons of variables. Even electric cars can be better or worse, depending on the source of your electricity. (Niagara Falls or a coal-fired plant?) But the 336 cars they mention in the quote could each carry four or five passengers, with much less emissions per person .

Here is a comparison, showing emissions per passenger per kilometer traveled (BBC):

Short haul flight 254 g per passenger per kilometer
Long haul flight 195 g
Car, 1 passenger 171 g
Bus 104 g
Car, 4 passengers 43g
Rail 41g
Coach (long-distance?) 27g
New high speed train 6g

That is a huge difference! Here’s a Guardian overview of the issues, showing that one trip London – New York – London would add more than 10% to one Uk citizen’s annual emissions. The trip would also emit more greenhouse gases than an average citizen of Paraguay (or 55 other countries!) would in a year. The world has 100 000 flights a day, a number which is increasing rapidly. Not good.

Airports OFTEN look like this!
https://www.insider.com/hacks-that-will-help-you-get-through-airport-security-quicker-2018-4

What should those of us who travel or want to travel do?

Some ideas

Stay home. Make home a place where you want to be more, building community, cleaning up, finding exciting things to do in your home city. Pledge to be flight free.
Fly less. And get governments to force the aviation industry to invest more in creating electric planes and generally reduce emissions. They have done very little towards that.
Take the train. See everything you could possibly need to know about train travel anywhere here. Or take a bus. The Site Rome2Rio shows pretty much every mode of transport anywhere.
How to get to Europe from North America (or vice versa): Unfortunately cruises tend to be vacations and aren’t useful for getting from point A to Point B. The Queen Mary does a regular Brooklyn to Southampton trip, but it’s 7 days, very expensive, and formal wear for dinner! Fly, then take the train when you get there, even though internal European flights are unbelievably cheap. ( I thoroughly checked freighters and repositioning cruises, and found nothing remotely useful for just getting from North America to Europe.)
Flying anyway? Research flights at Skyscanner and it can show you flights that have lower emissions. Take a non-stop because taking off and landing is by far the the most fuel-intensive part of any trip. Once you’re across the ocean, Rome2Rio can help you get to even the most remote place by bus or train.
Calculating emissions or footprint Here are some of the many sites that help with this.
- Via Rail... Carbon Footprint … Bullfrog … Atmosfair has a calculator and much more info as well
Offsets? There are lots of companies that will calculate your emissions, and offset them. It would be important to do some research on that one to be sure they actually do the carbon capture, tree planting, etc . If you do the comparison research, do tell me how the different sites compare!
Other offsetting I wanted to offset our recent trip by donating to green organizations I knew something about. When I was in Malaysia, I asked around a bit and found a local organization working to stop rain forest destruction from the creation of palm oil plantations, and made a donation. (Here’s their info on why you should be boycotting palm oil.) I also donated to a fantastic organization called Treesisters. I heard about them in the issue of The Guardian shown below. Its main article on the benefits of tree planting is here. I also donated to Rainforest Action Network.

I first heard about Treesisters in this Guardian issue here.

We need more trees We should all be planting all the trees we can, in person or by donation. In the Toronto area, an organization called LEAF gives advice and subsidies for backyard tree planting. There will be similar organizations in many cities.Tree planting does seem like one of the best things we can do in the long run. And we should be harassing our governments to do more of it. And of course reducing our carbon footprint so entire continents may be less likely to burn!
Greta Thunberg and George Monbiot have made an excellent short video about preserving nature, suggesting what we can do. In short: protect and restore nature, fund things which protect and restore nature, and stop funding things like the fossil fuel industry. Worth watching! You’ll find it here.

We ALL need to speak for the trees, not just the lorax! National Review Image

Conclusions

It is so tempting to find excuses, and leave it to someone else to reduce carbon emissions. It’s not my fault that the world is in a climate emergency, we think. But of course we do bear responsibility here. So we have to take action . And we have to get other people talking about these issues so that changed attitudes spread. Flygskam, or flight shaming is important enough in Sweden that in 2019 there was a drop in the number of people traveling through Swedish airports, unlike in other countries. We can do this too!

I’m not going to lie – I am not stopping all air travel right now. But writing this has forced me to see the urgency of these issues, and to follow some of my own advice. I’m not cancelling all planned trips, but I won’t travel by plane once I get to Europe in September… And I see a train trip to Vancouver in my future! Also – more donations to environmental organizations in addition to the regular ones I make already.

PS. Here’s a link in case you’re wondering what a tonne of carbon emissions looks like, as I was! And thanks for taking the time to read this to the end! MM

It’s not easy being green… but we have some good options!

When I used to teach the causes of World War One, I would say that for anything this huge to happen, causation is going be massive and complicated. (See Margaret MacMillan’s book The War that Ended Peace: 784 pages, or 32 hours of audio!) The question of climate inaction is so massive and complicated that I’ll just be looking at the some of the most massive factors, focusing on the individual for now. More to come in later posts.

Why is it so hard?

For people living in poverty, there is of course a whole series of obstacles to living green. In that situation, you have to focus on survival, and feeding your kids, with no time or energy for much else. For the others, there are lots of obstacles too.

The complexity of the situation is a barrier to action in itself. It takes a lot of time and energy to understand even the basics of the environmental problems we’re facing, and no one has time to spare these days. The media are more interested in getting our attention and our money, than in giving us balanced, responsible information. Corporate interests spend a ton of money to confuse and mislead us. (Here is a quirky animated history of oil companies doing this, seen below.)

Exxon scientists realized the future effects of climate change very early on

Choosing the greenest course of action can also be extremely complex and difficult for each of us. Even if people have a good understanding of environmental issues based on solid information, they may still disagree as to what best to do since their priorities, life experiences and personal situation are all so different. But whatever the result, we do need to prioritize changing to a more sustainable lifestyle. If not us, who? If not now, when?

The pleasures of an unsustainable lifestyle

Bottom line, most of us in OECD countries have a pretty amazing lifestyle. Basically, lots of everything. No one actually wants to give this up. And our brains make it very difficult to change, thanks to cognitive biases. Outdated circuitry in our brains influences our behaviour profoundly, without us realizing it. Confirmation bias helps us ignore evidence which is contrary to our current beliefs, and grasp at anything which seems to justify our position. Loss aversion makes any loss much more painful than any similar gain. The bystander effect allows us to think that someone else will solve the problem. We have problems paying attention to distant problems, especially when the worst effects are in the future. This BBC article analyzes a bunch more ‘brain biases’. Definitely worth reading.

How we can make the change – Just show up!

Just because it’s hard doesn’t mean we can’t do it. People have succeeded against the odds in the past, and so can we. The animated Story of Change shows it can be done, looking at how peaceful change has worked in the past. Voting with our shopping dollars and living in a way consistent with our values are important things, but we need to be active and demand that governments and corporations be pro-climate too.

Time to get out on the streets and demand change

I have been on some demonstrations in the past few months, (see my pictures below). They were peaceful, showed me that other people were also concerned about things, and made me feel I was doing something concrete and visible. We need to get over the idea that regular people don’t demonstrate. They do! And the media ignore it, so people don’t feel it matters. The answer is – more people taking part.

July 17th
May 1st
May 15th

Note the sign I’m holding, above. Here’s the full quote:

The biggest weapon people have is to try to make you think that you don’t matter. It is to say, “This doesn’t change anything.” Because if you can convince people that it doesn’t matter, then they won’t do it and people can go on as though it’s business as usual.
Alexandra Ocasio-Cortes

In spite of all these things holding us back, we really don’t have time for excuses. We all need to do whatever we can, and more. Here’s Greta:

I don’t want your hope, I don’t want you to be hopeful. I want you to panic…. And then I want you to act, I want you to act as you would in a crisis. I want you to act as if the house was on fire, because it is.
Greta Thunberg

The big thing we can all do right now is get out and be counted in Greta’s Global Climate Strike. Here is the link for the Toronto event, which is Friday, September 27th, 11:00 to 2:00 at Queen’s Park. We need to get a crowd bigger than the Raptor’s parade to show our leaders that we demand climate action! For people anywhere else in the world, check here for an event near you.

This is the image for the International Climate Change Strike, Toronto event. Click here for more info.

So let’s all plan on being there. You are needed! I will find a good place for a bunch of us to meet up, and put it out on the blog. Let’s get out there together and make some noise… Let governments and corporations know what you think. If crowds can force China to back down, then surely we can make our democratic government act on our wishes!

Where are we going with all this change?

The goal is a sustainable lifestyle where we’re not burning up the planet, and where climate change can be mitigated, facilitated by laws and policies.If you’re not familiar with it, check out The Green New Deal, a plan for climate justice in Canada.

How to Rock the 3 Rs

Reducing single-use stuff

Drinking en route

It is definitely a thing in North America to get take-out coffee, tea etc. and walk or drive around with it. (In Italy, for example, people generally drink it while sitting or standing around a cafe. But their coffees are much smaller!) And many cafes use disposables as their default mug. Styrofoam can be recycled here in Toronto, but paper cups are very difficult to recycle due to plastic coatings and glue. Most systems can’t even recycle the lids, if they’re black! So we need to carry around our own mugs. Also, we’re all hydrating like crazy, leading to massive plastic bottle consumption. So, if water is your thing, you need a reusable water bottle. And yet, I don’t see that happening …

From my back porch – cups used by other people in my house!
I used to believe local coffee shops when they said they recycled these, and saved them. I guess they don’t, and they’re all garbage now. /MCM

Getting around the obstacles

This is so totally the right thing to do. A lot of single-use stuff is going to be illegal soon – so we should start now! Some thoughts on making this easier.

Think about what type of bottle or mug will work best for you? Hot and/or cold? Insulated? Leak-proof? Big or small? Get the right one and you’re more likely to use it. See some choices at the top of this post.
Do you already own one that will do the job? There is likely a good selection at a thrift store near you. (Seems like a lot of people have given up on reusable mugs!)
Plan your daily routine to include reusables. And, yes, it may be a bit less convenient! Put it where you’ll see it so you remember to take it with you.
But it’s only environmentally friendly if you actually substitute it for a disposable. And because the reusable took more energy and resources to make,you have to use it a lot to make a small environmental footprint.
In a multiple-person household, it may help for people to have their own, easily-identified mug.
Figure out how washing it will fit into your routine, since a bad smell makes it pretty unappealing! There are many ways of cleaning mugs and bottles – a vinegar soak seems to work pretty well. More info here.
Challenge other people you know to do the same! We need to make this normal.
Complain if your local coffee shop is making this difficult. And encourage them to go reusable, for in-house drinks. Other ideas? Comment below!