As I was doing some green browsing around the internet over the last few days, a couple of terms caught my attention. One of them was ‘greenflation’, where the term “green†is used to justify almost everything and anything, as long as it can make the claim of lowering carbon (via the International Herald Tribune).
The article mentions the curious case of Sharp County in Arkansas where citizens are fighting a local ban on alcohol so that they don’t have to take a 70-mile round-trip journey to buy their beer or whatever else they like to drink. All in the name of carbon footprint reduction, of course. I personally think, well, if these people are going to drink anyway, then, yes, let them buy their drinks closer to home and save some toxic waste into the atmosphere for the sake of a few drinks.
The other term was ‘genetic footprint’, an expression a reader used in the comments section of this post about 2008 in the Guardian’s green blog. This refers to the problem of population growth, an issue that hasn’t been incorporated into the climate change debate on a mainstream level but which is likely to become louder this year. Keeping the world’s population growth rate under control is one of the most eficient ways to reduce carbon emissions and the strain on the planet’s resources. It is predicted that at the current growth rate the human population on this planet will reach nine billion people. And then things will get seriously complicated. Just imagine: our natural resources are getting depleted and then we have more people to feed, to dress, to entertain etc. It’s a recipe for disaster. Here‘s a good article about this topic.
