I haven’t blogged in years, and I wasn’t very good at keeping up with it back then either. So I am going to try again. Clean slate. This time I have an idea, a purpose, a story and a partner in crime. Come along for the journey (literally if you want to!) It started off as many things in my life seem to these days, with a simple Tweet. My friend Clare (@Ottercivet), inspired by Greta Thunberg was on a mission to reduce her carbon emissions. Can we get together a group of ornithologists and drive at least part way to the Australasian Ornithological Conference in Darwin? Pffffffft I thought, who has time for that! And how much carbon is it really going to save anyway? After a few weeks of this nagging at me I realised that’s exactly the point! If reducing carbon was so easy we’d all be carbon neutral. Plus, if everyone at the conference saved just 100kg of carbon on their transport, that’d be >30,000 kg less carbon going into the atmosphere! Now you can easily do this in far less dramatic ways than driving 1000’s of km across Australia. Some advice I’ve read from various sources suggest flying direct instead of taking the often cheaper, multiple stop over flights - cruising in a plane uses hardly any fuel, it’s all in the take-off and landing. Even just packing light (or dare I say, losing weight) can make a big difference to aircraft fuel consumption. There are also some really great carbon offset funds you can pay into to ease your conscience. I know what you are thinking – the plane is going anyway. There are arguments to counter this but I’m not going into them here, when it comes down to it, this is just you making excuses, like I was. Driving has much lower impact on climate change compared to flying. As you get more people in the vehicle, you lower the per person emissions exponentially. You could say that the best way to reduce carbon emissions would be not to attend the conference at all. You would be making a good point but you would also be missing our point. This is not an anti-airline, anti-conference or anti-travel campaign, we are not advocating a boycott of any sort. We both have family overseas, we both have cars, we both fly regularly. We simply want to be more carbon aware. To think about how our choices contribute to global climate change. Because really, unless you walk, any type of transport is going to produce carbon. Follow along with our adventures on twitter #BirdNerdRoadie
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AuthorAt work and at play my life revolves around our amazing wildlife. In particular I am passionate about birds and am very bad at regular blog posts. Archives
July 2020
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