🌱 The Grumpy Optimists #115
Communicating climate change, vehicle ads being banned and rewilding showing its power yet again...
Happy Monday. 👋
Welcome back to another week of positive climate news in what is a big week as COP28 kicks off in the UAE on Thursday. I will be keeping a close eye on the news coming out of the event but given that it takes place in an oil state and is run by the CEO of an oil exec, the next few episodes may be a little trickier than they need to be!
Anyway, let’s dig into a week of positive climate news covering Christmas jumpers, transport, food and plastic waste and rewilding getting another dose of praise.
👀 Articles to read
👕 Lidl launches a returnable Christmas jumper. Lidl has partnered with By Rotation to launch rentable Christmas jumpers. As somebody who does not own a Christmas jumper and thinks of it as a bit of a waste for the one time a year, I might wear it, I LOVE this news. You can rent a jumper for £2 a day until 31 December with all profits going to the NSPCC with a minimum rental period of 3 days. Interestingly, Hubbub, found in 2019 that 12m jumpers were forecast to be bought despite 65m already existing in UK wardrobes. A big win, and maybe, just maybe, it could be my first Christmas jumper.
🇫🇷 French government says no to Black Friday clothes shopping. The French minister for ecological transition, Christophe Béchu, launched a campaign encouraging people not to buy new clothes in the Black Friday sales. Béchu also launched subsidies for clothing repairs earlier this year as France looks to tackle the emissions from fashion. However, the campaign did not go down all too well with other parts of the French government and highlighted the friction between a society reliant on constant consumption and one trying to tackle the climate crisis.
🚘 Toyota’s SUV ad banned for climate reasons. The ad below from Toyota has been banned by the Advertising Standards Agency (ASA) in the UK for the way it shows "off-road driving in natural habitats, a common theme in SUV advertising". I get that these are vehicles built to drive offroad but realistically, how many people driving SUVs do you ever see driving offroad?
⚡Nissan puts £2bn into UK electric vehicle production. The funding will go towards producing two new EV models in Sunderland as well as a new gigafactory. It follows the car giant’s announcement that all its vehicles sold in Europe will be electric by 2030.
🛢️A fake agency and a fake pitch for Saudi Aramco. Atmospheric is a global agency created with one purpose: to give businesses the social license they need to Keep The Fire Burning™. The company is openly mocking ad agencies that continue to work with big oil and gas and contribute to the destruction of our planet. This is a great illustration of how some companies can be part of keeping the party going. Check out the rest of their fake ads too.
🍏 Tesco backs plans to ban plastic on fruit and veg. With the UK throwing away 100 billion pieces of plastic per year, any plans to ban unnecessary plastic waste are important. Tesco is backing the UK’s plans to ensure that at least 70% of packaging is being effectively recycled and composted and ensuring an average of 30% recycled content across all plastic packaging. It’s not the most ambitious target, but it is a start.
🍽️ UK to reconsider mandatory food waste reporting. It was only back in July that the UK government decided against implementing food waste reporting to reduce the shocking amount of food waste produced each and every day. However, the new leader in the revolving door that is the Environmental Secretary role, is reconsidering whether there should be mandatory food waste reporting. While this is not a complete success, it does show another u-turn on climate policy that might lead to more impact.
📽️ Actor Jo Brand gets behind the lens to communicate climate. Communicating climate change is not easy. There’s complexity, data, more data and more complexity, oh and scientists who aren’t always the best communicators. That’s why it’s great to see the actor Jo Brand help ‘translate’ climate science in a way even Doris from Doncaster will understand. I’m all for making climate communication easier, that’s literally THE reason why I started this blog over 3 years ago.
🐺 It turns out, letting nature thrive is pretty crucial. Scientists looked at the effect of just nine groups of animals and found the results were positively shocking, begging the question, what more can we do to protect them? Here are some of my favourite facts from this article.
For every 100,000 additional wildebeest in the Serengeti, the amount of carbon stored in the environment rises by 15%.
Scientists suggest protecting or restoring populations of specific animal groups, including marine fish, whales, sharks, grey wolves, wildebeest, sea otters, musk oxen, African forest elephants, and American bison, could capture 6.41 billion tonnes of CO2 annually.
Grey wolves in boreal forests can indirectly remove carbon from the atmosphere by controlling herbivore populations, allowing young trees to grow.
However, the results also found that the impact of animals on carbon storage can vary depending on the ecosystem, and rewilding alone may not be a complete solution to climate change. The key takeaway? Animals matter in our fight against climate change, we need to give them the chance to thrive.
🐋 Blue whales return to tropical haven. As a perfect example of the point above, blue whales are increasingly returning to the Indian Ocean where they were wiped out by whaling decades ago. More than 300,000 blue whales were killed in the 20th century. The blue whales are increasingly returning to the Seychelles, an area with a larger amount of protected oceans, in part due to a debt for nature swap, whereby the country had £16.8m of its national debt written off to protect oceans.
This week's episode was written after a copious amount of food for Thanksgiving with my wonderful housemates, both current, new and old. One thing I’d like to say I’m grateful for is all of you who keep coming back to read The Grumpy Optimists each week. I don’t always know who’s reading this newsletter and sometimes it feels like a bit of a slog (it’s been 115 weeks of writing from my bedroom), but when I get messages from people to let me know they loved this week’s episode, it really does mean a lot. So this week, spread the joy of giving your friends, family or colleagues a compliment, chances are, it will make their day and it will make you feel better too.
Next week I’m taking a week off, it’s my birthday and I want to enjoy a weekend of running, eating food and being with friends.
Lots of love,
George, the Grumpy Optimist 💚