What is sustainability? And are you it?

I'm sure you have spent today (Easter Sunday) gorging on Chocolate, I dont celebrate Easter, I'm not a religious guy, but I'm sure chocolate its a great way to celebrate the death and re-birth of a man who definitely didn't eat chocolate.

Anyhow, back to the main topic.

Are you living sustainably? I'm sure you feel good about recycling the odd bit of cardboard, driving a Tesla and heating the house with a heat pump, but is that enough? I have thought about this a lot recently. The green lobby tell us to be sustainable but no one seems to tell you what that actually means. Luckily I've just found the answer, so it thought I would share my new found wisdom with you.

My hero, Greta Thunberg has a book out called "the climate book", the book is not by Greta alone, its by over 100 people all writing a small article on their specialist subject. Its very, very good, but man is it depressing.

For those of you who dont want to read all 438 pages here is what I consider the highlights. I hope Greta doesn't mind me recycling this here, if she does it would be weirdly ironic.

The world is warming and its down to us and the way we live, it wasn't the Victorians, they might have started it but we, yep you and me have had a bloody good go of it too. Most of the damage has occurred in the last 20 years.

The way we live today is obviously not sustainable, there are to many of us consuming too much stuff. On page 406 Lucas Chancel and Thomas Piketty write this:

So there are bad guys everywhere, some of them might be you, or me. The aim is to get below 1 tonne of CO2 per annum per person. In the UK we average 9 tonnes each.

On page 355 Kate Roworth lays this out. This is what it looks like to be sustainable (1 tonne) right now.

Is this you?

Its not me, in our house we have loads of stuff, the average UK house has 200,000 things in it, its an astonishing number of things, but think about it, every knife, fork, plate, pair of trousers, shoes etc, there is literally mountains of stuff, mostly crap we probably dont need and shouldn't have bought.

So what do we do, well a long hard think about what you and use do day to day would be a start. do you want to be part of the problem or part of the solution?

A few years ago there was a bunch of people who claimed it, climate change was all a hoax, they were called deniers, but they seem to have disappeared now. They have a new tactic, its called despair. basically the new line is its too late, we are all buggered.

I dont want to tell you what to do but I'm sure its a good idea to be well informed. Buy the book, or if you want to be really green buy it second hand or borrow it.

I will leave you with this: John Alroy from Macquarie University wrote this gem about the state of the planet...

" a geologically instantaneous ecological catastrophe too gradual to be perceived by the people who unleashed it"

it sounds a lot like "forgive them father for they know not what they do" Nothings changed in 2000 years.

Happy easter, enjoy all that crap you bought and dont forget to recycle the box. I'm sure it will help.