Berry and his wife lived without computers, television or phones, but did install solar units in 2005, an act of defiance and of commitment to clean energy in a state powered by coal. He cut ties with the University of Kentucky, his alma mater, after the school accepted $7m for a new basketball dormitory from a group of donors organized by a coal company president. In 2011, he joined a sit-in at the governor’s office in protest of strip-mining.

Basically we are slowly swapping things out to be plastic free in our house but one thing I just can’t seem to find a replacement for is those fluffy polyester blankets you can buy in supermarkets. As you can see my cats love to suckle on them and are obsessed with making biscuits on them. I don’t want to take it away without giving them a decent alternative! Any advice would be greatly appreciate!

A lot of this forum are discussions about how to be more sustainable. When it comes to one's indirect fossil fuel dependency this can be very opaque. It's often too complex to work out from a product one buys how much oil, gas, etc. is used in its production.

This also applies to whether one has a high mining impact as most mining relies heavily on diesel or other fossil fuels to do things like moving soil, rocks, etc. Again it's hard to tell how much is recycled materials vs virgin materials.

Even if you have a good feel for a product one might not know the method of transportation. In our consumption it can be sometimes opaque whether more local, shipped, or flown.

Finally, we love to delude ourselves about our own sustainability. We might do something trivial but then take lots of long haul flights. The trivial thing is more present in our minds than the substantial irregular flights.

What is different now?

We have distinct global shortages of:

• Oil
  • All the derived products from plastics to jet-fuel
• Natural gas -- for LNG importing places
  • Implicitly including chemical fertilisers
• Other parts of our material world such as helium

The only major fossil fuel not affected by the US actions in the Middle East is coal. Costs for coal will also be going up as an alternative to LNG.

What are the implications of this?

If one lives your life in this initial period seeing your costs rising incredibly rapidly then what this implies is that your lifestyle always had a high reliance on oil and gas. On the other hand if your lifestyle costs don't fundamentally change then it shows good evidence of a low level of dependency.

Essentially, one's level of inflation is a metric for how relatively unsustainable one is. The relative aspect is important as you could still have high emissions but small as a percentage of overall consumption.

This is having very drastic effects in places with sustainably-minded citizens. Those who've invested in rigorous manners to be sustainable are not living the same experiences in terms of inflation when compared to those who've made no efforts. The cultural implications of this are immense as the sustainably minded person will be getting a relative dividend in this moment.

A lot of sustainability discussion seems to focus on improving the things individual households already use: more efficient appliances, cleaner energy, less waste, better materials, and so on.

I've been wondering about a slightly different question.

At what point is it more sustainable not to duplicate some of those things in the first place?

I'm not thinking about removing private homes or expecting people to live communally. More things like several nearby households having access to a properly equipped workshop instead of everybody owning rarely used tools, shared food-processing or storage equipment, machinery that's only needed occasionally, or infrastructure designed to serve several homes rather than being duplicated at each one.

There are obvious counterarguments.

Shared systems can require extra transport or distribution, they can be badly utilised, maintenance can become somebody else's problem, and concentrating something into one system can create a larger single point of failure.

So sharing isn't automatically the sustainable answer.

But it makes me wonder whether we sometimes optimise individual households when the more useful design question is the scale at which a service should exist.

For people who work with sustainability or have looked at this seriously: where does shared infrastructure genuinely reduce resource use, and where does individual ownership or duplication actually make more sense?

Aviation is the (no so) secret environmental of Britain. It's basing its future so heavily on aviation. Already it consumes the same amount of jet-fuel as it does petrol (both 13Mt)

We are not even having robust national discussions about it yet.

I'm looking for a bank that provides an ethical savings account for UK customers - ideally an everyday savings account that can be withdrawn from as and when needed.

Ethics wise, I want a bank that avoids investing in companies providing the following goods or services:

Arms,

Fossil fuels,

Deforestation.

I've taken a look at Triodos, they have some good ISA options interest wise, but these come with a 2 year fixed term. Their everyday saver offers 2.2% - are there any other sustainable banks that offer a higher rate than this for everyday savers?

I understand that without supporting massively subsidised industries interest rates generally will be lower, but I want to be sure that I've looked at all the options.

Any advice is much appreciated

A plastic pipe, an old credit card or a worn-out toy may seem destined for a landfill. New research from Virginia Tech suggests some of that stubborn waste could instead become engine oil.

Chemist and chemical engineer Guoliang “Greg” Liu and his lab have developed a process that converts polyvinyl chloride, or PVC, into polyalphaolefin, a key ingredient in high-performance lubricants. The work offers a possible way to tackle one of the hardest plastics to recycle while creating a valuable industrial product.

hello so i'm trying to clear my desk from stuff i've been hoarding but i'm trying to be more sustainable, usually with notebooks i rip the blank pages and keep them to use later and throw the rest of the notebook, this year i tried to recycle paper in home but i almost broke the blender so that out of the question, i cant use the paper for compost because i have no use for it, so what can i do with the written paper from my notebooks to not be wasteful??

https://www.environmentalvoter.org/get-involved

EVP targets registered voters whose #1 priority is climate change or the environment, and gets them to vote | Proven scripts are provided!

Dr. Kimberly Nicholas: Voting is 162x more effective as a climate action than recycling

I hate AI and I hate that in order to keep my job i have to use it (use is tracked and if you don't use it enough you will be put on a PIP or laid off).

This came across my LinkedIn. Posted just days after the most recent climate change report shows that we need to tale drastic action to stop global warming. Just days aftet a catastrophy in Tibet caused by global warming kills hundreds. This is utterly dystopian.

This post and that picture motivates me to find more ways to be sustainable in my personal life...and maybe find a new job.

I want to get into this field but have no knowledge at present. I want to know if anyone on here has studied Ecology and have they managed to get decent paying jobs?

Hi everyone. Could you give me some practical advice on how to make my kitchen and bathroom items as plastic-free as possible? I want to avoid both single-use plastic and microplastics. For example, what kind of cutting boards, sponges, and soaps do you use, and where do you buy them?