Positive thinking

Luca Panzone, Newcastle University and Natasha Auch, Newcastle University How does your food shop affect the planet? Well, think of it like this – consuming just one egg emits between 260 and 330g of CO₂ to the atmosphere. That’s because before that egg can reach your plate, animal feed has to be produced and delivered to the hen that laid it. That hen then needs heating pumped into the shed it shares with the other hens on the farm, and their eggs have to be transported, often by van, to the shop you buy them from, where they’re stored in refrigerators. There’s also the packaging that must be made to store the eggs and the process of cooking them to consider. All of this takes energy, which, more often than not, is generated using fossil fuels. We can analyse the carbon footprint of a particular food item by working out the quantity of greenhouse gases that are emitted during the production of raw materials, industrial processing, transport, storage, cooking, consumption...

Marcelle McManus, University of Bath   It will be very difficult to reduce greenhouse gas emissions by enough to halt global heating at 1.5°C – the threshold at which catastrophic climate change becomes more likely – according to a new paper published in Nature. If the Earth warms by more than 1.5°C , millions of people could be displaced by sea level rise and global crop yields could decline. Fortunately, the political will to prevent this seems more widespread than ever . The UK recently became the first major economy to pass a commitment to net zero emissions by 2050 into law . Sounds positive, so what’s the problem? Well, the new study has shown that if the world continues to use its existing power plants, it’s likely that the target of 1.5°C will be exceeded. If all the fossil fuel plants and other carbon-emitting infrastructure that’s currently planned are built, this target will certainly be exceeded. There is a significant number of fossil fuel plants curr...

   Rick Greenough, De Montfort University Sweden has built the first smart road that will allow electric vehicles to charge as they drive . The eRoadArlanda pilot scheme, which covers two kilometres of road outside Stockholm, is an attempt to solve one of the biggest challenges that the transport industry faces. Namely, how to move freight and people in a way that neither damages the climate through greenhouse gas emissions nor the quality of air through nitrogen oxide pollution . The eRoadArlanda scheme is supposed to extend the range of electric vehicles beyond what was previously possible. Yet as an engineer, I have concerns about the durability of this road. Even more significantly, the cost of the technology and the disruption that building it causes is likely to restrict any mass scale replication. If this solution cannot be widely replicated then it is really no solution at all. Instead, a serious attempt to reduce hazardous emissions should focus on m...