How bad are bananas? - book review

 How good is your carbon instinct?

Unlike the book about virtual water, this book (albeit a revised version re-edited in 2020) is based on a concept little more familiar to the public tongue - the carbon footprint.  Similarly, this is a topic that has that has grown from a scary concept to a harsh reality since its original writing in 2010, whereas the concept of virtual water remains in its public infancy 10 years on from the book.

Before I begin this report, I would like to address a common misconception I have witnessed across my A-Level study of climate change - a carbon footprint and carbon emissions are not exclusively to do with carbon dioxide.  Yes, carbon dioxide emissions are important and the increase in carbon dioxide production is a huge part of our role in enhancing the greenhouse effect, but the more "dangerous" greenhouse gas we tend to also produce on mass scale is methane.  It is considered to be 28 times more effective in radiation absorption (in Lehman's terms, it is 28 times stronger).  Of course the smaller residency times in the atmospheric store does play a part, however we must not only consider our carbon dioxide emissions.

Most worryingly, an enormous amount of methane is currently stored in the cryosphere (ice), highlighting how, the methane release when the ice melts has a true global significance.  So the next time you hear someone say "save the turtles!", make sure you encourage them to save the polar bears too!  If you really want to get specific, nitrous oxides are actually 265 times more potent than carbon dioxide over 100 years but I haven't come up for a catchy line for that yet!

I believe this book is unique in the way it aims to educate rather than inspire or provoke fear in our carbon emissions and how to reduce them.  For me, the most important thing about this book is how it presents the scale of the emissions.  Of course it is a great idea to make all of these little changes that can cut down our carbon footprints, but the book provides information on activities that cost anywhere from less than 10 grams of CO2 to billions of tonnes, inspiring you not to make more changes to your lifestyle, but more effective ones.

Further reading

- The rebound effect and "carbon demand"

- Can we scale up carbon capture and storage to a level of global significance?

- The need to lobby global change

- Carbon in the transport industry


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