The Green Debate
Whilst debating the subject of “Global Warming is a Hoax” with some people on the Internet (note that it was a pre-loaded debate and not “Is Global warming a Hoax?”) I was kindly introduced to the following piece of footage.
Before you watch the following clip I just want to say that although we’re proponents of the green movement we encourage open-minded debate and clarity of thought and we always have a healthy dose of scepticism in our thinking, be it toward the green and non-green sides of the argument.
This allows for us to arrive at well considered conclusions and to have no blind opinions without looking at the available facts. It is with these simple default parameters that we have come to the path of promoting the 21st century green lifestyle.
But don’t let our greenisms sway you, just watch, listen and consider the content of this video…
Many thanks to GiorgosK for enlightening us with this footage.
Blighty Eat World
Oops! Todays the day Britain starts eating the world!
We have just run out of our own natural resources and are about to become dependant on supplies from abroad, according to a study by the New Economics Foundation.
The UK Interdependance Report (PDF 2.45Mb) maps out our dependance on the Earth’s resources and shows that the average UK citizen is living beyond their means by going into “ecological debt” on April 16th 2006.
What this means is that if annual global consumption levels matched our own we would need 2.1 more planets with Earth’s resources to meet the demand. Back in 1961 the world was big enough for everyone to have a lifestyle similar to those enjoyed by UK citizens. Now that has increased threefold!
France, Germany and even Russia are behind us with environmental footprints of 3, 2,5 and 2.4 respectively, but the USA is way ahead, needing the resources of 5.3 planets to fuel it’s vast appetite.
The ecological footprint is calculated by measuring the amount of land and water humans need to a) produce the resources they consume and b) dispose of the resulting waste.
As with Friday’s stark warning on climate change the burgeoning nations like China and India are increasing their own “standards” of living, demanding more from their lifestyles and putting further pressure on the planet’s resources.
The reports authors hope the findings will highlight the need to curb our rising consumption levels, saying that current lifestyles are becoming incresingly unsustainable and placing greater pressures on the global environmental system.
At a time when our self-sufficiency on food has been in decline for a decade and our need for natural gas has led to imports from abroad it is time to start taking serious steps to avoid the threat to the earth’s ability to sustain future generations.