RODALE NEWS, EMMAUS, PA—Solve global warming, or just sit and hope to wait it out? According to the new book by former Vice President Al Gore, Our Choice: A Plan to Solve the Climate Crisis (Rodale, 2009), it's, well…our choice. Yet it isn't always obvious how the choices we make on a daily basis, even those seemingly unrelated to climate change, impact the environment, and solutions can sometimes introduce yet more problems if not carefully considered. A follow-up to the wake-up call of An Inconvenient Truth (Rodale, 2006), Our Choice is a collection of what Gore considers the most effective solutions to stop the ill effects of global warming.
Here are five things Gore's new book can teach you about global warming, and how you can help solve the problem:
#1: Wind farms aren't as bad for birds as you think. One of the biggest complaints about windmills and wind power is that they pose a threat to migrating birds. While windmills are responsible for about 28,500 bird deaths annually, cats are responsible for 100 million, power lines 130 million, and tall buildings 550 million. Pesticides and automobiles kill another 67 million and 80 million, respectively.
WHAT YOU CAN DO: Keep your house cats inside the house to protect bird species, and use organic lawn care to avoid hazardous herbicides and insecticides, and to foster a welcoming habitat where migrating birds can rest. Then, call your utility company and ask to purchase wind power.
#2: Good intentions can have disastrous side effects. When the world finally woke up to the dangers of heart-damaging trans fats in processed foods, many food companies switched from hydrogenated vegetable oils (the source of trans fats in many processed goods) to palm oil, which comes from palm trees grown in Southeast Asia. However, as Gore writes, the demand for palm oil has led to a booming growth of destructive palm oil plantations, which are created by clear-cutting existing forests and burning or draining peatlands, valuable wetland bogs that store vast quantities of carbon dioxide. As the peatlands are drained or burned, all that carbon is released back into the atmosphere, adding to the greenhouse gases there. In addition to its use in food, palm oil is also a coveted plant source for biodiesel fuel.
WHAT YOU CAN DO: Eat fewer processed foods, and when you do, buy products made with canola oil or other nonhydrogenated vegetable oils like soybean oil. A recent study from the USDA's Agricultural Research Service found that palm oil was just as likely to raise unhealthy LDL cholesterols as hydrogenated vegetable oils, anyway. Palm oil is also used in the manufacture of candles, but rather than feed deforestation efforts just to add a little ambiance to your home, look for beeswax candles, which are healthier than petroleum-based paraffin wax and don't destroy the planet.
#3: Chemical farming uses 10 calories of fossil-fuel energy to produce a single calorie of food. Way back when, farmers used animal manure to feed their fields, and its high content of naturally occurring nitrogen made it a very efficient plant food. Then, after World War II, scientists discovered a way to make synthetic nitrogen and turn it into fertilizer, and chemical farming was born. However, the production of that nitrogen consumes vast quantities of natural gas, which also contributes to global-warming pollution. Producing a single ton of synthetic nitrogen fertilizer burns enough natural gas to release 4.6 tons of carbon dioxide into the atmosphere.
WHAT YOU CAN DO: Eat organic. Organic farmers boost plant production by keeping soil healthy. Using compost, beneficial microorganisms, and farming techniques like crop rotation, organic agriculture makes synthetic nitrogen use unnecessary. In fact, organic agriculture techniques add carbon to the soil instead of releasing it into the atmosphere—which means buying organic food not only keeps toxic chemicals out of your body, it helps mitigate global climate change. Our Choice quotes the Rodale Institute's Tim LaSalle making the point that switching to organic agriculture could reduce the world's current carbon dioxide emissions by almost half.
#4: Changing your light bulbs really does help! Gore got criticized after the film version of An Inconvenient Truth seemed to suggest that the first step people should take to combat the overwhelmingly huge problem of global warming was merely switch to compact fluorescent light bulbs. But, as he points out in Our Choice, energy efficiency is a sorely overlooked approach to serving our energy demands. Research has found that every $1 invested in energy-efficiency programs, such as better fuel-economy standards for cars or subsidies for energy-saving windows, saves $2 that would otherwise be spent on adding new sources of power or improving our aging national energy grid. Such investments have already worked in California, where, despite steady population growth, strict energy-efficiency guidelines implemented after 1970 have allowed per-capita energy use to remained flat while, in the rest of the country, per-capita energy use has increased by 60 percent.
WHAT YOU CAN DO: Yes, switch your light bulbs. These tiny changes can have a big impact, considering that 65 percent of the energy generated at power plants never reaches your homes due to inefficiencies in electricity infrastructure. The less power you use at home, the less that's generated at power plants—and the less that gets wasted along power lines. Almost any step you take that reduces your electric bill will also reduce the emissions that contribute to global warming, so buy energy-efficient appliances, turn things off when you're not using them, and make sure your home is well insulated for winter.
#5: The skeptics are still among us. Despite numerous reports from the world's and the nation's leading scientists that global warming is occurring and that it is, in fact, manmade, skeptics still question the reality of the situation—fed, Gore writes, by coal- and oil-industry "propaganda" and news reports that treat the issue as a debate rather than scientific fact. He cites one study of newspaper articles, in which the authors analyzed 14 years of stories published in major newspapers and found that about 53 percent presented the issue of global warming as a debate. However, in the first two years of articles they analyzed, 1988 and 1989, most of the stories presented the science accurately—that human-induced global warming was a real problem. In 1990, he points out, a coalition of oil-, coal, and auto-industry executives launched a massive campaign denying that global warming was a problem and that "the role of greenhouse gases in climate change is not well understood," and since then, those industries have continued to publish what he calls "pseudo-scientific" papers that don't have any scientific credibility but cast doubt on the research being published in legitimate peer-reviewed journals.
WHAT YOU CAN DO: Listen to science, not big business. The United Nation's Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change has published four reports (and is working on a fifth) concluding that human-induced global warming is a problem, and earlier this year a coalition of 40 U.S. government scientists and academics reached the same conclusion. Become familiar enough with the reports so you can bring them up when involved in discussions about the validity of climate change.