Two hours by plane usually ends up as four and a half in total when you factor in time at the airport, plus you can turn up at your destination first thing in the morning feeling refreshed rather than tired from travelling. Then once you factor in the stress, noise, environmental impact and delays that come with flying, the night train becomes a really attractive option.
It's easy to reduce problems down to an exclusive-or choice, but in reality we need to use all our cards at the same time to look after our planet.
Of course we should be reducing plastic waste, and at least where I live, I've seen a big push for the reduction of of single use plastics, both through legislation, savvy consumers and responsible supermarkets.
While the biologists work on plastic-eating enzymes, product engineers can work on sustainable packaging, logistics specialists can work on low carbon distribution and politicians can work on ensuring economic motives align with a positive future for our planet.
> at least where I live, I've seen a big push for the reduction of of single use plastics, both through legislation, savvy consumers and responsible supermarkets
Have we? Or have we just seen campaigns and legislation against plastic straws and supermarket bags, which amounts to mere virtue signalling and greenwashing by corporations and governments?
We need to do much better than ban plastic straws and advertise how we've saved the world. Properly pricing in externalities onto the price of single use plastics would probably go a long way to motivate the market to give a shit.
Dunno... In my country, you put your garbage in special bags on your front door once a week. They get collected. We have to sort our garbages: plastics and metals (mostly use to wrap food) in one bag, paper in another one, biological stuff (plants, unused parts of vegetables, etc) in another one and the rest in the yellow bag. Nice and cool (although I'm not sure how useful it is in the end).
Now the funny thing is that you get to see other families' trash bags once a week on their front door and there are big differences. My family has a tiny yellow bag every week and a blue one every other week whereas many others (with comparable family sizes) have 2 yellows at least and 1 blue every single week.
My guess is that they eat a lot of food coming from the supermarket: lots of wrapping, lots of cans, etc. It's an informed guess because the blue bags are transparent :-)
Absolutely not a complaint or really directed at you, but random thought: I wish people would name the country instead of saying "in my country" - teach me something that is attached to a real place!
Grass-fed cows gain weight more slowly, so they produce more methane per unit of meat produced. However, it can be argued that grass fed cattle farming is a net positive for Greenhouse emissions, since the carbon captured by the larger pastures can offset the effect of the methane emissions from the cattle. In some cases the entire farm's operational emmisions could be offset. Note that this is climate dependent. [1]
It is important also to note that if the land were instead used for growing crop for human consumption, then the carbon capture effect would be far higher, and that generally grass fed beef in the US are fed grain in the final months before slaughter. Other factors like water usage of cattle farming per calorie produced compared to human consumed crop can put even grass fed cattle farming in a bad light.
There's a large amount of range land which is impractical for farming. However, it is suited for grazing. It was used for bison before domestic cattle.
If we conclude that bovine grazing is harmful, should we conclude that exterminating the American bison was green?
Cattle/livestock is also used for improving the quality/fertility of the soil for growing crops. It drastically reduces the need for harmful fertlizers, the need to till the land as much (reducing diesel usage) etc.. Also, the milk and meat is a nice bonus.
The Sacred Cow documentary is worth watching which goes into detail of this cycle - including that a lot (most?) crops use animal manure for fertilizing, so you still need the animals.
I've been having a lot of fun in Planet Coaster and Planet Zoo by Frontier recently. Highly creative games and give a good rest from higher paced genres.
