This is the second year Earth Hour has come around and it is heartening to see so many people participating and talking about it. Like many environmentalist say, this act won’t really make an impact on reducing the earth’s carbon footprint and is more a means to awareness.

Now that Earth Hour is over, I’m hoping the awareness can translate to more action.

The hard question we need to ask now is what else are we doing besides turning off your lights for an hour.

If this one hour is all we going to do, then we’re really just paying lip-serving in the fight against global warming and making sure future generations have a decent place to live.

Here are some simple things that I think can be done and it’d really be nice to see people make efforts like these.

Bring Your Own Woven, Cloth or Recyclable Bag When You Shop
I always have a couple of these in my car and at the office. I also have a few nice trendy looking cloth bags, one a light messenger sling, that I use when I hit the town to shop. When I travel overseas, I bring one of the larger hardier canvas bags so I can throw all my purchases in.

Haven’t you noticed how many bags and wrappers we throw away as we pack our shopping into our luggage when we come home. Or how many plastic bags there are in your drawer which have only been used once?

Using recyclable bags is really simple to do and it really just takes a bit of remembering to get into the habit of. Plus it’s easier on your hands and back when you use these larger and easier to carry bags.

It really pains me to see animals suffering as a result of thoughtless disposal of plastic bags so I ask how many animals caught in plastic bags or how many more dead animals do we have to see before it sinks in that we shouldn’t be using plastic bags. How about more of us following the examples of countries like China, India and Australia which have banned plastic bags

Crush And Compact What You Throw Away
I learnt this during my three years flying with SQ. Onboard an aircraft, you only have so much space. When we have flights with full passenger loads the amount of waste disposed is unbelievable. All crew are taught to flat fold things like wrappers, boxes, crush tins, use hot-water to shrink the space a plastic bottle takes up and other tricks to compact waste.

What else do we do when we’ve run out of space for trash on a 13 hour flight with 344 passengers? Stomp and jump on the existing waste. We actually can recover about 20%-30% of space.

Next time you throw something away, make the effort of flattening the drink carton, cardboard box or plastic bottle. It will go some way to saving space in landfills which are running out of space for all our trash.

Lower Usage Of Your Air-Conditioning & Use The Fan
Yes it is hot but have you noticed how chilly it gets in the wee hours of the morning? I try to sleep without the A/C whenever possible and when it’s too hot, I set the A/C timer to go off at about 2.30am. I have a small tower fan circulating the air and that provides a pretty pleasant breeze through the night. I know most nights at about 4am-5am, I actually need to pull the covers over me ’cause it gets that cold in both Singapore and Malaysia.

I’ve also visited many friends who have the A/C running in different rooms of the house that they’re not using. With my good friends I go around turning these off and grumble a little. Those who’ve made the effort to turn on the A/C only in rooms they’re in have said their electricity bills have dropped.

These two acts not only saves money but your skin doesn’t dry out as much and it goes a way towards one staying youthful looking.

Eat Less Meat :: Go Meatless on Monday or One Day Of The Week
You’ll find lot’s of articles about how “present meat consumption in industrialized countries is unsustainable.”

See:
- BBC: Hungry World ‘Must Eat Less Meat’
- Guardian UK :: Meat Production ‘Beefs Up Emissions’
- WSD-CD Climate Blog :: Getting to the Meat of Climate Change

Yet most people are loathed to cut meat out of their diet.

Well, how about reducing meat intake by declaring one day of the week meatless?

This will make you realise how much meat you eat and how little vegetables & fruits make up your diet. After doing this for a few weeks, many people start eating more fruits, vegetables and getting a healthier mix of foods on other days.

I’m vegetarian 99% of the time but there are moments I take just a little fish or meat to remind myself what it tastes like or if I have cravings. The one thing I was really surprised about is how much longer things in my fridge last without meat and how much better I feel after two plus years of almost no meat or fish. A large part of me is driven by vanity and people have said my skin glows a little more now and I do look like I’ve lost a few years and I attribute this to my diet change.

Time To Not Just Complain
We’re all complaining about the weather getting hotter or colder and more erratic. I think its time we go beyond one time activities like turning off our lights for one hour and move on to greater efforts that will have a positive effect our planet.

These are just four simple things we can do. Even doing one is better than not doing anything.

Was traveling on the KLIA Express and happened to pay attention to the flyers that were given out by the cashier staff.

Information cards are given out by them and next to the dustbins are collection boxes for you to drop the cards into so they are recycled.

I think this is a really brilliant idea and I really like that it attempts to help save the earth. From the number of cards dropped into the collection boxes I can see that many of us really would make an effort to recycle if it was something we can do easily.

I’m wondering how I can use this idea with all my clients as the advertising and marketing industry is really responsible for a lot of paper wastage as flyers and brochures are cast away often without being read.

Go Green Idea KLIA Express

What is the use of a house if u haven’t got a tolerable planet to put it on?~Henry David Thoreau

When I was back in SG … I got a ride in a friend’s Toyota Prius. Its a hybrid car … he got it 6 months ago and he just needs to fill it with petrol once a month. Once a month!!! That’s amazing. When the engine runs on electric mode …. its so quiet!

http://www.toyota.com/prius-hybrid/

Anyway …. here’s some articles that might be of interest.

10 Best Fuel-Efficient Cars
When it comes to squeezing every last inch of motion out of a drop of gasoline, no one does it like Honda. The Civic ties the MINI Cooper for the title of (deep breath) most economical non-hyrbid car with an automatic transmission on this list — an amazing feat considering the Civic’s acres of interior room and full complement of safety features.

http://cars.about.com/od/helpforcarbuyers/tp/top10_fuel.htm

How to drive green – How to drive green

If you don’t want to change your current car, there are still ways you can drive greener.

http://www.whatcar.com/green-special-report.aspx?NA=225213&EL=3194630

its been an eye opening experience since i decided to go meatless on 29 Mar.

there are quite a lot of insights i wanna share …. to get it into digestable bits for easy reading … i’m gonna write this in parts ….

here goes part 1 …….

after 80 days … calculated at this website http://www.timeanddate.com/date/duration.html … i’ve had a chance to re-evaluate and here are some things i’ve stumbled upon:

- you need to explain the different types of vegetarianism to almost everyone who chances to eat with you
(yes i do eat eggs, diary, garlic and onions ….no its not for religious reasons …. there are vegetarians who don’t eat eggs and diary & they are called vegans ….. garlic and onions are thought to be aphrodisiacs so that’s why some vegetarians abstain fr eating them for religious reasons)

- finding food is hard …. most places all over asia don’t cater to vegetarians so its quite a pleasant surprise to come across a cafe or restaurant that has a nice selection of vegetarian choices alongside meat options
(being vegetarian does not equal eating salads …. this for me has now become an indication of how a person doesn’t use his ability for deeper thinking … for dates it means i’m not going to go out with this person again)

- i’ve to make sure i eat across a range of foods each day to get all the necessary nutrients coz eating leafy vegetables only means i get a lot of roughage (making me go to the toilet more) but that doesn’t necessarily mean more vitamins and nutrition ….
eating across a range of foods includes tofu, mushrooms, as many different colours of vegetables outside green … from leafy vegetables to roots to fruit vegetables and stem vegetables and seeds and …. hmmm …. list can go on some more i think

Finishing thoughts …. its been an exercise in discipline and each incident which i come across making it hard for me to feed myself just strengthens my resolve to stick with my decision to be vegetarian.

They say by now I won’t be able to eat meat properly …. likely to react by either throwing up or getting the runs … haven’t tried eating meat to experience either of those … if by chance i accidentally do and these reactions happen … i’ll let you know.

took me 30 mins to get to a pump to fill up my car … and i use BHP instead of Shell or Esso. The queues around petrol stations were horrible all over KL and the resulting jams that saw cars backed up for kilometers were not pretty.

the ugly malaysia reared his/her ugly head in queue jumping, taking his/her own sweet time at the pump and the impatient many who leaned on their horns.

we are a society that is completely dependent on fossil fuels. we really need to cut down on this usage and dependence and find alternative forms of energy that is better for our planet

i’m seriously wondering how i can cut down my fuel usage in a city that has terrible transportation infrastructure … not like i can just bike to work and stay in the office all day

Excerpts from a report I read. More disturbing news about the toll of farming on the environment:

. . . Factory farming takes a big, hidden toll on human health and the environment, is undermining rural America’s economic stability and fails to provide the humane treatment of livestock increasingly demanded by American consumers, concludes an independent, 2 1/2 -year analysis that calls for major changes in the way corporate agriculture produces meat, milk and eggs.

. . . Food prices are rising faster than they have for decades. Concerns about global climate change have brought new attention to the fact that modern agriculture is responsible for about 20 percent of the nation’s greenhouse-gas production.

Read more here: http://www.envirolink.org/external.html?itemid=200805010804490.163085

*** Its heartening to see people making small efforts to do something.

My PR partner’s office switches off all their lights during lunch when most of the office goes out. Some of my friends now make it a point to turn off all the lights when they leave their apartments to go out … or when they go to sleep … when previously they used to leave a nite light on.

Small actions all add up to make a difference.

Those of you who’re interested to take part in the next KL Freeze, visit the links below for more details.

Why Freeze for World Earth Day?

The average person globally uses 2255 Watts of power, or a little less than 23 x100 Watt light bulbs. (www.wattzon.org)

Now that’s a lot of power to be wasting. Imagine if we could Freeze the daily activities of as many people as we can for 5 minutes. That’s a looooottt of power we’re saving for the future generations.

http://www.facebook.com/event.php?eid=11840893166

http://randomalphabets.com/

Stumbled across this as I was researching more about nutrition and a vegetarian diet as my sister insists a person cannot go without meat.

I’m appalled that 90% of the soy crop, 80% of the corn crop, and a total of 70% of grain grown in the U.S. goes towards feeding animals raised for food.

She lives in the U.S. so i don’t blame her for her misconceptions.

Source: Wikipedia – http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vegetarian

According to a 2006 United Nations initiative, the livestock industry is one of the largest contributors to environmental degradation worldwide, and modern practices of raising animals for food contributes on a “massive scale” to air and water pollution, land degradation, climate change, and loss of biodiversity. The initiative concluded that “the livestock sector emerges as one of the top two or three most significant contributors to the most serious environmental problems, at every scale from local to global.”

When tracking food animal production from the feed trough to consumption, the inefficiencies of meat, milk and egg production range from 4:1 up to 54:1 energy input to protein output ratio.

LONDON, April 4 (Xinhua) — Global temperatures will drop slightly this year as a result of the cooling effect of the La Nina current in the Pacific, a UN meteorologist has said.

It is likely that La Nina would continue into the summer, depressing temperatures globally by a fraction of a degree, the World Meteorological Organization (WMO)’s Secretary General MichelJarraud said, according to a report by the BBC Friday.

However, Jarraud insisted that 2008 temperatures would still be well above the average for the century.

“When you look at climate change you should not look at any particular year. You should look at trends over a pretty long period and the trend of temperature globally is still very much indicative of warming.

“La Nina is part of what we call ‘variability’. There has always been and there will always be cooler and warmer years, but what is important for climate change is that the trend is up; the climate on average is warming even if there is a temporary cooling because of La Nina,” he was quoted as saying.

The WMO pointed out that the decade from 1998 to 2007 was the warmest on record. Since the beginning of the 20th Century, the global average surface temperature has risen by 0.74 degrees Celsius.

La Nina and El Nino are two great natural Pacific currents. El Nino warms the planet while La Nina cools it.

This year, the Pacific is in the grip of a powerful La Nina. It has contributed to torrential rains in Australia and to some of the coldest temperatures in memory in snow-bound parts of China.

Source: http://news.xinhuanet.com/english/2008-04/04/content_7920018.htm

To do something, visit http://www.liveneutral.org/

I’ve been going meatless now and then since Bryan went vegetarian after god-mom’s passing in Dec and I have been toying with the idea of going completely vegetarian.

Today seems so to be the day …. I’m going vegetarian because of these 2 reasons:

Dad’s Health
I was speaking to my mom today and she was telling me how dad has recently cut down on his starch intake to better manage his diabetes which I’ve been nagging him to do for a year. Since he’s cut his starch, his blood sugar levels are more regulated now.

But mom worries about him eating less food as he doesn’t really like eating vegetables.

So I told her to let dad know 2 members of our family are vegetarian so he should start eating more vegetables now so he’ll get used to eating lots of vegetables when they both get to KL in July.

Global Warming
Global warming poses one of the most serious threats to the global environment ever faced in human history. A United Nations (U.N.) report in 2006, said that raising animals for food generates more greenhouse gases than all the cars and trucks in the world combined. Carbon dioxide, methane, and nitrous oxide together cause the vast majority of global warming. Raising animals for food is one of the largest sources of carbon dioxide and the single largest source of both methane and nitrous oxide emissions.

There are too many signs that we’re possibly quickly getting to the point of no return so this is my effort to do something.

Hope anyone reading this can think about reducing your carbon footprint in an effort to keep our planet from getting any warmer.

Reduce Your Carbon Footprint

To find out more and calculate your carbon footprint, visit: http://www.carbonfootprint.com/

Signs that things are really bad:
Massive Antarctic ice sheet collapses with global warming – 2 days ago

Choral Bleaching In Philippines

Things You Can Do:
http://www.direct.gov.uk/en/Environmentandgreenerliving/Greenerlivingaquickguide/DG_064391
http://www.carbonfootprint.com/minimisecfp.html
http://www.earthshare.org/get_involved/earth_saving_tips.html
Fight Global Warming by Going Vegetarian: http://www.goveg.com/environment-globalWarming.asp
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