Banana

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Last, but not least, I wish Koeppel had used footnotes to cite his source material. I suppose he deemed them too “academic” for the average reader or something. Instead, his sources (both major and minor) are dropped into the narrative with an audible CLUNK! ��� For example, if you grow your own apples, then they’re leaving no footprint at all. If you’re eating a locally grown, seasonal apple, then the footprint will be around 10 grams CO₂e. But on average, the apple you get at the supermarket will have contributed about 80 grams each, or 550 grams per kilo.

Interesting, fairly well researched - there's a LOT of estimating and "roughly right" stuff here, but it's a fuzzy calculation, carbon footprint is- and every now and then the author says, "I guessed on this number" but he's guessing from a position of knowledge.

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It’s hard to miss the news about climate change. Every day there seems to be a new story about melting polar ice, floods, endangered species and how we should expect more hurricanes and extreme weather. It’s up to us, as the citizens of Earth, to push our leaders into action and do our own part to reduce the harmful emissions that are ruining our planet. But if we look at all the different ways to get around, you might be surprised at which method leaves the biggest footprint. As for vegetables, the average kilo of carrots is only 300 grams CO₂e, while potatoes come in at 370 grams. But these relatively small footprints can grow if they’re not cooked efficiently. If a lot of heat is wasted, these figures can jump significantly.

Sometimes, on long car trips with LSW, we compete for who can make up the absurdest micro-history title, following the pattern “X: The Y that Changed the World”, where X is the name of an object and Y is the category to which the object belongs. I remember suggesting X=Mauve, and then found out later there is really a book about this, proving that politics is not the only endeavor where satire has become obsolete.) Mike Berners-Lee minutely examines and calculates the carbon footprint (by weight) of many activities and items in his new book, How Bad are Bananas?: The Carbon Footprint of Everything.

My brother-in-law is obsessed with food miles. Obsessed. He flat-out won’t buy anything not grown in the UK. And yet his last holiday involved flying to Africa. And he eats a lot of meat. And he wants to have a child. In the vein of Mark Kurlansky’s bestselling Salt and Cod, a gripping chronicle of the myth, mystery, and uncertain fate of the world’s most popular fruit

When it comes to washing the dishes, your footprint is also going to vary depending on your methods. If you’re careful about the amount of water you use, it can be around 540 grams CO₂e, but if you’re wasteful with the water, it can climb upwards of 8 kilograms. There are some eye opening facts. For example, the net benefit of installing solar panels on a single home are pretty small. Berners-Lee's calculation is 50 tons of carbon emissions, which is just a bit higher than properly insulating one's attic (35 tons). If you were to bike that distance, let’s say on a diet of bananas, it would leave a 53-kilogram CO₂e footprint. By train, it would more than double to 120 kilograms; and by a small, fuel-efficient car, it would increase six-times over to 330 kilograms. But flying would increase the biking footprint tenfold, to around 500 kilograms CO₂e. It is likely that sitting in a bowl on your kitchen table or sideboard is the fruit of the largest herb in the world - a banana. The author tried to infuse this work with an overarching drama, which is "a banana blight that is tearing through banana crops worldwide". This is a fact, however there seem to be some solutions in place, and at least several alternatives. In any case, some chapters end with sentences like "this is why the banana you eat today might be the last of its kind you eat. Ever!". Hilarious! But please, go on! Bring us another one of whatever this guy is drinking!!That’s where How Bad Are Bananas? becomes really helpful. Mike ‘I didn’t invent the internet, that was my brother’ Berners-Lee sifts through a myriad of data to rate everyday activities in terms of just how carbon-centric they are. The resulting book is a bit heavy-going in places, but Berners-Lee is an affable narrator, making it an entertaining-yet-thinky read. I remember the first time I ever understood that the retelling of ordinary events could become magic. I a teenager, just beginning to write, searching for inspiration. I’d always loved books about other worlds – science fiction, Edgar Rice Burrough��s Tarzan series, even old pulp novels I bought at a local junk shop. But it had only recently begun to occur to me that the greatest constructed worlds could be found in works that were considered to be ‘true’ literature. That point was made most sharply with Gabriel Garcia Marquez’s One Hundred Years of Solitude…” We all have our routines, and it’s easy to think that these daily habits of shopping, cooking and washing up are harmless. But just think of how much food you throw away over the course of a year, or how many appliances you leave turned on or plugged in when they don’t really need to be. The average size of a carbon footprint varies from country to country, but it tends to be bigger in the developed world. In Malawi, for example, the average carbon footprint of a person is around 0.1 metric tons of CO₂e per year. The average person in the United Kingdom, however, measures up at around 15 metric tons per year, while the average North American comes in at around 28, and Australians at 30 metric tons. As for the planet as a whole, in 2007 we produced around 49 billion metric tons of CO₂e.

Mike Berners-Lee's book - if the name sounds familiar it's because his brother is credited with inventing the Internet - aims to develop in readers an intuition for the carbon cost of things in general, but discussing the specific impacts of a hundred different things (e.g., an apple, a rose, a car crash, a baby, the World Cup, War). Even though the book doesn't seek to convert anyone to a hippie, liberal, tree-hugger doctrine, it did persuade me to make a few changes to my life so that I might contribute less to climate change. For starters, it reinforced my belief in buying foods locally and in season. Our industrial food complex has created quite an environmental mess. Also, it has made me think about hanging the clothes to dry instead of using an electric dryer and looking into alternative water heating methods. The most important thing we can do is simply this: think. Think about where the products we consume are coming from and where they end up after we are finished with them. Think about what we can compromise on or adjust to live more efficiently. Think about how the things all we do are connected and we are part of a bigger picture. Think about asking questions like, "How bad are bananas?"

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How far the vegetables traveled is again important, as out-of-season vegetables can require a lot of energy to transport: 250 grams of locally grown asparagus will leave a 125-gram CO₂e footprint, but if it was airfreighted to London from Peru, that footprint expands to 3.5 kilograms. But the biggest mystery about the banana today is whether it will survive. A seedless fruit with a unique reproductive system, every banana is a genetic duplicate of the next, and therefore susceptible to the same blights. Today’s yellow banana, the Cavendish, is increasingly threatened by such a blight—and there’s no cure in sight.