Okay Google, find me the lowest carbon route home. 🚗

How Google is using Maps to reduce its user's emissions and other positive environmental news from the Grumpy Optimists.

Apr 06, 2021

Hello all and welcome back! 👋

We hope the long Easter weekend was as much of a blessing for you as it was for us. Playing sports, seeing friends in the park, and having some sunshine was perfectly timed.

While it was great to have some early spring sunshine, the extreme, strange and somewhat confusing weather we're experiencing is not only bad for the sunflowers I've just planted, but the mere fact that we had snow less than 24 hours after garden beers is a worrying sign of the future.

While that is a negative, grumpy note, it's a little dose of realism climate change is happening right now. On a more optimistic note, let's take it as another argument for action. I think the news this week is illustrative of how climate action is increasingly embedded into government and business. For that, we have hope, even in a system that is perhaps not designed for us to care about the environment.

Enjoy the week, and stay tuned for some fantastic guests we'll be having interviewing over the coming weeks!

Articles

🌪️ The boom behind green energy isn't blowing anywhere. The White House aims to build 30GWs of offshore wind capacity by 2030. That's enough power 10 million homes. It's great progress but 10 million homes aren't going to solve climate change.

🚗 Okay Google, find me the lowest carbon route home. Google will soon launch the lowest carbon emission route based on traffic, slopes, and other factors. Get home a little slower, but (incrementally) save the planet.

🌱 Multi-billion dollar bank for carbon sequestration. The Biden administration is planning to roll out a scheme to increase carbon sequestration, funded by government and big business as a carbon offset tool.

🏡 Cut costs to green homes. A leading committee of MPs have urged the UK government to cut VAT for repairs to electrical goods and green home improvements. The 2021 Budget could learn a lot from promoting remanufacturing over buying new.

🖥️🔋Apple and Tesla come together for climate change. Tesla Megapacks will be used on the solar farms powering Apple's operations and supply chains. Apple also announced all of its 110 suppliers will decarbonise their electricity consumption.

🌿 Get (s)turfed. An older article but one we stand by, not just because artificial grass is fecking hideous, it should literally be a crime against nature. Take home from this article? Perfect lawns are a construct, let your grass go wild.

🐷 China to be home of the vegan? While China consumes 28% of the world's meat, including 50% of the world’s pork, the country is increasingly the home of the vegan meat revolution, overcoming the culture of meat as a luxury. Good news for the planet, and for the pigs.

🏭 Canada begins pricing climate change. Canada has declared it constitutional for businesses to pay a carbon tax. All the better I say.

🌿 How valuable is soil?

Grounded, a production by Earth Minutes and the talented Emma Askew looks to shed light on the dark stuff and highlight the importance of soil in our ecosystems and in the fight against climate change.

💉 Where do you draw the line between the human body and the health of a population?

Not that we are in any way anti-vaxxers, this episode was a fascinating insight into the first 'anti-vaxxer' Pastor Henning Jacobson in 1902 and the role it played in the argument for eugenics.

The Grumpy Optimists

Discussion about this post