{"id":7012,"date":"2017-10-24T07:23:50","date_gmt":"2017-10-24T07:23:50","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/blogs.bath.ac.uk\/edswahs\/?p=7012"},"modified":"2017-10-24T07:24:54","modified_gmt":"2017-10-24T07:24:54","slug":"eat-more-children-to-combat-climate-change","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/blogs.bath.ac.uk\/edswahs\/2017\/10\/24\/eat-more-children-to-combat-climate-change\/","title":{"rendered":"Eat more children to combat climate change"},"content":{"rendered":"<p>For those unwilling to face difficult ideas \u2013 even when expressed satirically \u2013 it's probably best to put the bag back over your head now rather than read on.<\/p>\n<p>The following are facts, according to a\u00a0study of 39 peer-reviewed papers by\u00a0Seth Wynes, from the University of British Columbia, and Kimberly Nicholas, from Lund University. \u00a0Their work, <em>The climate mitigation gap: education and government recommendations miss the most effective individual actions<\/em>, is published in <em>Environmental Research Letters<\/em> [**].<\/p>\n<ul>\n<li>Vegetarianism\u00a0saves 0.8 tonnes of CO2 a year. \u00a0This is four times more effective at reducing emissions than recycling and eight times more effective than changing to energy-efficient lightbulbs.<\/li>\n<li>One person living without a car would reduce carbon output by 2.4 tonnes a year<\/li>\n<li>Avoiding one transatlantic flight would save 1.6 tonnes of carbon every year. \u00a0This is the same saving as an individual makes recycling waste for 20 years<\/li>\n<li>One child results in up to 59 tonnes of CO2 a year<\/li>\n<li>Having one child fewer is better for the environment than 700 teenagers dedicating themselves to recycling for the rest of their lives.<\/li>\n<\/ul>\n<p>The researchers end their paper like this:<\/p>\n<blockquote><p>\u201cWe have identified four recommended actions which we believe to be especially effective in reducing an individual's greenhouse gas emissions: having one fewer child, living car-free, avoiding airplane travel, and eating a plant-based diet. \u00a0These suggestions contrast with other top recommendations found in the literature such as hang-drying clothing or driving a more fuel-efficient vehicle. \u00a0Our results show that education and government documents do not focus on high-impact actions for reducing emissions, creating a mitigation gap between official recommendations and individuals willing to align their behaviour with climate targets. \u00a0Focusing on high-impact actions (through providing accurate guidance and information, especially to 'catalytic' individuals such as adolescents) could be an important dimension of scaling bottom-up action to the transformative decarbonisation implied by the 2\u2009\u00b0C climate target, and starting to close this gap.\"<\/p><\/blockquote>\n<p>However, an alternative \u2013 if somewhat unpalatable (in every sense) \u2013 conclusion from all this would seem to be to eat more children \u2013 preferably other people's of course. \u00a0I need to say that this is not a conclusion that the researchers include in their paper.<\/p>\n<p>..........................................<\/p>\n<p>[**] Seth Wynes and Kimberly A Nicholas 2017 Environ. Res. Lett. 12 074024<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>For those unwilling to face difficult ideas \u2013 even when expressed satirically \u2013 it's probably best to put the bag back over your head now rather than read on. The following are facts, according to a\u00a0study of 39 peer-reviewed papers...<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":237,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_acf_changed":false,"footnotes":"","jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false},"categories":[2,5],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-7012","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-comment","category-talks-and-presentations"],"acf":[],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack-related-posts":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogs.bath.ac.uk\/edswahs\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/7012","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogs.bath.ac.uk\/edswahs\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogs.bath.ac.uk\/edswahs\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.bath.ac.uk\/edswahs\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/237"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.bath.ac.uk\/edswahs\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=7012"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.bath.ac.uk\/edswahs\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/7012\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogs.bath.ac.uk\/edswahs\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=7012"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.bath.ac.uk\/edswahs\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=7012"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.bath.ac.uk\/edswahs\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=7012"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}