EnviroStats!

Dear fellow readers,

Happy New Year! I hope the New Year finds you well.

I am well but as New Year is a time of new beginnings, I am serving notice I will drastically reducing my blogging here due to lack of time from recent changes in my life. I am not completely stopping to blog, but I will only post entries which come with a report now, containing vast amounts of information each time, rather than just an article with each entry and environmental statistic of impact. Those reports are the real solid resources, not the daily articles with some statistics here or there that often need more explaining than not, which was the main reason I blogged since otherwise, this would just have been a duplicate information blog.

I will keep this blog, the URL and space holding all the reports in the Reports tab until at least 2009 because even without a lot of entries, this blog still serves a useful purpose to supply information that can be searched on-line. The data here isn’t that old so it will still be useful for at least another year. However, if you want to stay posted of new entries with minimal efforts, I would suggest you click on one of those feeds links on the left and get updates that way, to your newsreader or email. There won’t be that many so you won’t be bothered that much, I will guarantee you that because while I will continue to learn and stay up-to-date environmentally, I will just learn it for myself for the most part rather than blog it out to share due to lack of time. If past records show anything, there aren’t that many reports to share frequently. Otherwise, please check back at your own convenience.

So with that, I would like to say thank you to all of you for reading, many for supporting it with Stumbles, advice, comments, pingbacks, etc., especially Shea Gunther, Cindy Wang and Tracy Stokes. I hope you have enjoyed the blog and that you will still find what information there is to come of use.

I wish all of you a happy, healthy and prosperous green 2008 in many ways.

Sincerely,

Minh Tan
Envirostats! author

There’s your total for the weather damage in Britain in 2007. [Envirostats author] 

- The (British) Environment Agency via the Guardian, Dec 7 2007

There’s a lot of health benefits to being vegan, but also a lot of challenges just to stay healthy because it is hard to get all the nutrients you need to stay healthy in the quantities you need, like iron.

Looking at this statistic, you should be concerned about your health in your ability to go vegan if you are considering it, and not the nobility of global warming. You can offset the 1.5 tonnes CO2 for about $45, which is a LOT less than the cost you’re going to incur in eating meat compared to going vegan, or your doctor and health bills if you don’t go vegan sufficiently to sustain your health.

I’m not against one or the other. I’m a meat-eater, to be upfront. However, I’m not going vegan because I know I can’t without devoting far more of my life to my diet than I care to do to get the proper requirements to not only stay healthy but also to marathon training. I know others who do it and I know I can’t do what they do so props to them. I’m just trying to put things into perspective, which is part of my purpose in having this blog.

However, here is some great advice from the source article below on how to be a “caring carnivore”, a term that must just make the vegans and vegetarians cringe! [Envirostats author] 

How to be a caring carnivore

* Elect to eat one or two organic, locally produced cuts of meat a week rather than eating cheap processed meat every day

* Roast a chicken and live off it for a week, making stock from the bones and eating the leftovers – avoiding wastage

* Investigate meat alternatives such as tofu (pictured left), tempeh, textured vegetable protein and Quorn

* Buy organic milk, or try soya (pictured right), almond, oat, hazelnut or quinoa milk instead

* Chicken and pork are more carbon-efficient and produces less methane than beef

* Be aware of other good sources of protein. These include pulses, beans, nuts, seeds and, of course, soya beans

* Many kinds of bread and even some vegetarian products contain unnecessary milk products like whey, buttermilk or lactose, or eggs. Check the packaging and avoid buying non-organic dairy by avoiding these products 

- Researchers from the University of Chicago for statistics on vegan versus meat-eater emissions via The Independent, Dec 23 2007

- Unattributed source for number of British vegans, via same newspaper source and link above

I don’t need to type out what I think of the Chinese government already before this, never mind after, or how its oil monopolies are like the rest of the world’s oil giants. The numbers from their actions speak for themselves. [Envirostats author]

- Worldwatch Institute, Dec 6 2007

A nice story on the silver or gold lining of global warming with all the green jobs generated, with more similar statistics attached below as excerpts from the source.

The number of jobs created was what was compared to the pharmaceutical industry, not the revenue generated or anything to do with money where I suspect the pharmaceutical industry would reverse the ratio. It was a bit unfair of the source, UNEP, to pick a big industry that is growing but in no way to the extent, but which makes a lot of money so it has a big presence in people’s minds. [Envirostats author]

- The renewable energy programmes in Germany and Spain are merely ten years old but have already created several hundred thousand jobs.

- The Indian city of Delhi is introducing new eco-friendly compressed natural gas buses that will create an additional 18,000 new jobs. - The ethanol programme in Brazil has created half a million jobs and its bio-diesel programme is specifically designed to benefit hundreds of thousands of mostly poor smallholder farmers.

- By the year 2020, Germany will have more jobs in the field of environmental technologies than in its entire automotive industry.

- In Europe, a 20 per cent increase in energy efficiency would create about a million jobs. The same applies in emerging and developing countries.

- United Nations Environment Programme (UNEP) Press Release, Dec 6 2007