Is your supermarket ‘climate-friendly’? Here’s how to tell | 24CA News

Our planet is altering. So is our journalism. This weekly e-newsletter is a part of a 24CA News initiative entitled “Our Changing Planet” to point out and clarify the results of local weather change. Keep up with the newest news on our Climate and Environment web page.

Sign up right here to get this article in your inbox each Thursday.

This week:

• Is your grocery store ‘climate-friendly’? Here’s easy methods to inform
• ‘This is okay’: A more in-depth take a look at a well-liked local weather meme
• Air air pollution is altering how our mind features, say researchers

Is your grocery store ‘climate-friendly’? Here’s easy methods to inform

Two weeks in the past, I wrote my first What on Earth? story in additional than half a 12 months. That’s as a result of I took a break from work to make amends for different elements of my life.

But I did not cease desirous about local weather tales, and one factor that caught my consideration whereas I used to be off was a challenge involving Drawdown Toronto. It’s a local people group that shares targets (and a reputation) with Project Drawdown, a worldwide non-profit group devoted to selling efficient options to struggle local weather change.

They had been recruiting volunteers at a neighborhood eco-fair in November to assist create a map of which grocery shops had been nonetheless utilizing highly effective greenhouse fuel refrigerants referred to as HFCs (hydrofluorocarbons). 

Drawdown Toronto and Drawdown BC are each serving to with the Climate-Friendly Supermarkets challenge launched by one other non-profit referred to as the Environmental Investigation Agency (EIA). The purpose is to encourage supermarkets to drastically scale back their emissions by switching to greener refrigerants.

HFCs can lure 1000’s of occasions extra warmth within the ambiance, pound for pound, than carbon dioxide (CO2). Project Drawdown says stopping HFC emissions and changing them with extra climate-friendly refrigerants, similar to ammonia and CO2, are among the many handiest actions to struggle local weather change. 

Meanwhile, the EIA’s work has discovered that leaks from grocery shops are widespread. In the U.S. alone, it calculated that every 12 months, HFC leaks from supermarkets trigger as a lot world warming as burning 22 million tonnes of coal.

I’m an everyday contributor to “citizen science” apps (or “community science” apps) like eBird and iNaturalist, the place I document sightings of birds, bugs and different organisms for databases that scientists use. They present a chance for peculiar folks to assist collect information over a big space that will be very tough or unimaginable to get in any other case. I’ve additionally discovered rather a lot by collaborating in them.

So I used to be intrigued by the grocery store mapping challenge and signed as much as assist out.

About per week later, Drawdown Toronto acquired in contact by e-mail, assigning me and different volunteers every to totally different close by grocery shops. I used to be to go to a Shoppers Drug Mart a number of kilometres from my home. 

Once there, I adopted the directions despatched by Drawdown Toronto, on the lookout for labels close to the highest of every fridge or freezer within the retailer. They had despatched an instance, so I knew what to search for. I took footage of a number of utilizing my telephone (which was rather a lot simpler than photographing birds or bugs). No workers requested what I used to be doing, however had they completed so, I’d have fortunately defined.

According to the labels, the freezers in that specific retailer had been made in 2012 and used the HFC refrigerant R404A, which has a worldwide warming potential of three,922. That signifies that over 100 years, every tonne of R404A can heat the ambiance by as a lot as 3,922 tonnes of CO2 — not good.

When I acquired dwelling, I emailed the images to the EIA. A couple of weeks later, it appeared as somewhat pink dot, displaying the shop makes use of HFCs. Stores that use pure refrigerants similar to CO2 seem as inexperienced dots, whereas those who use each are orange dots. 

Anyone can add their native grocery retailer, and there are a lot of elements of Canada the place the supermarkets have but to be mapped.

Avipsa Mahapatra, local weather marketing campaign lead for the Environmental Investigation Agency, stated she hopes the map will elevate consciousness, encourage supermarkets to take motion and assist buyers select extra climate-friendly shops.

24CA News could have extra about HFCs and their affect on the local weather, Canadian refrigerant rules and the way Canadian grocery shops examine to the remainder of the world within the coming days.

— Emily Chung

Reader suggestions

Vivian Unger:

“Your piece about the need to find more sustainable ways to travel than by air struck a chord with me. I live in Atlantic Canada, where passenger rail is appallingly bad. Trains only run in one direction per day, they can’t go at full speed due to the condition of the tracks and they’re slower than the bus even when they arrive on time, which they rarely do. Yet my last MP made a big fuss about expanding our airport. To the best of my knowledge, the Liberal government has done nothing to improve rail travel since its inception.

“This is a giant, spread-out nation, and we’d like methods to get round it. Yet Canada is the one G7 nation with no high-speed rail in any respect. This must be thought of a nationwide embarrassment. Addressing it must be [Transportation Minister] Omar Alghabra’s high precedence.”

Old issues of What on Earth? are right here. 

24CA News has a dedicated climate page, which can be found here.

Also, check out our radio show and podcast. This week, we find out how the ongoing drought in Somalia is causing ripple effects here in Canada. What On Earth airs on Sundays at 11 a.m. ET, 11:30 a.m. in Newfoundland and Labrador. Subscribe on your favourite podcast app or hear it on demand at CBC Listen.

The Big Picture: ‘This is fine.’ But what does it all meme?

It’s hard to quantify the popularity of any given internet joke, but it’s fair to say the “This is okay” meme is one of the better-travelled examples. As seen above, it’s the mordant two-panel illustration of a coffee-drinking dog in a burning room assuring the reader, “This is okay.” When web users want to satirize society’s lack of urgency on issues like COVID-19, far-right extremism or climate change, this is the meme they often reach for.

The graphic is the work of Massachusetts illustrator K.C. Green, and is actually part of a six-panel comic strip called On Fire (part of his Gunshow webcomic series), which he posted online about a decade ago. But it’s the abbreviated two-panel version that stuck. 

Memes have become one of the dominant forms of modern storytelling, for individuals and organizations alike, and Green’s creation has become a key part of climate change communication. For example, Greenpeace has used Green’s artwork to demonstrate the problem of Amazon deforestation, and you can buy merchandise that says “This shouldn’t be tremendous,” featuring a tired Earth in place of Green’s hound. 

In a recent interview with 24CA News’s As It Happens, Green said the original comic strip was actually meant to reflect his feelings about taking antidepressants, and what they might do to his personality. He’s sanguine about the fact that his comic has been used in completely different contexts. 

The last decade “has helped me perceive the notion of 1’s artwork,” he told host Nil Köksal. “It may need been only a comedian I needed to sprint off as a result of I had a self-made schedule for my webcomic on the time. But, , folks take what they need out of your artwork — with out your permission half the time.”

Hot and bothered: Provocative ideas from around the web

Air pollution is changing how our brain functions, say researchers

Researchers at the University of British Columbia and University of Victoria have found that exposure to traffic pollution is changing the way our brain works.

“Air air pollution is affecting our considering, which might have severe public well being results,” said Chris Carlsten, director of UBC’s Air Pollution Exposure Lab and one of the researchers of the study, published Jan. 14 in the journal Environmental Health.

Carlsten says exposure to diesel exhaust for just two hours led to changes in brain function connectivity, a measure of how different regions of the brain interact with each other. 

The most affected regions are linked to memory and attention, he says.

Changes in connectivity are associated with reduced cognitive performance and symptoms of depression, “so it is regarding to see site visitors air pollution interrupting these identical networks,” said Jodie Gawryluk, an associate professor of psychology at the University of Victoria and the study’s first author.

The study measured the brain activity of 25 healthy adults over periodic exposures to diesel exhaust and filtered air. Functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) captured bright splotches of changing brain activity between exposures to polluted air and clean air filtered from pollutants.

Carlsten says the images showed clear differences between both scenarios, but adds more research is needed to understand what these differences mean. 

While the results of the study have led to more questions, Carlsten says the researchers are confident about one thing: air pollution, and climate change, is changing how brains function. 

“We’re all uncovered [to traffic pollution], not solely in B.C. and domestically, however globally it might have main implications,” he said. “That’s why we’re doing this work to attempt to push issues, push the notice and push the insurance policies [for change].”

Dr. Melissa Lem, president of the Canadian Association of Physicians for the Environment, says one-third of Canadians live within 250 metres of a major road. 

“This tells us that there are lots of people who’re going to be affected by traffic-related air air pollution,” she said, adding impacts can vary from slow childhood development to heart disease, cancer and brain alterations.

“If we’re uncovered to sure issues, folks could discover mind fog … hassle concentrating … [or feeling] a bit extra irritable and drained,” she said. “So in the event you suppose you are smelling fossil gasoline fumes and you are feeling that manner, get away from them and go inside.”

Carlsten says pollution levels used in the study were comparable to air pollution in cities like Delhi, India, or to industries like mining. 

“Occupations in closed areas and no good air flow are most in danger,” he said.

He added that B.C. is not immune to these issues, due to annual exposures to wildfire smoke. While more research needs to look specifically at the effects of wood smoke on the brain, Carlsten speculates results would be similar.

“Diesel exhaust shares loads of related traits to fireside smoke when it comes to the particles,” said Carlsten. 

To avoid negative impacts, Lem suggests wearing an N95 mask on especially smoky days and investing in proper air filtration systems. 

“From a wider group standpoint, we have to get extra vehicles off the highway,” she said. 

“We’re dealing with a local weather disaster and an air air pollution disaster on the identical time, each pushed by fossil gasoline combustion. By getting extra folks out of vehicles and onto bikes and sidewalks, we are able to sort out each concurrently.”

— Arrthy Thayaparan

Stay in touch!

Are there issues you’d like us to cover? Questions you want answered? Do you just want to share a kind word? We’d love to hear from you. Email us at whatonearth@cbc.ca.

Sign up right here to get What on Earth? in your inbox each Thursday.

Editor: Andre Mayer | Logo design: Sködt McNalty