The Christmas Energy Crunch (part one)

by Christine McLaughlin

I love Christmas: to me there’s nothing more enjoyable than decorating a tree by candlelight whilst singing Away in a Manger through a big mouthful of mince pie. But increasingly I feel that our Christmas experience is being hijacked by consumerist values that ultimately make a massive contribution to climate change. There’s something Neroesque about our government’s desperation to prop up the banks during the credit crunch whilst all but ignoring the environmental disaster that is created every Christmas.

Climate Talk is an organisation based in Yorkshire. Last year they commissioned some research into the environmental impact of Christmas. They found that an average person’s Christmas celebrations from Christmas Eve until Boxing Day produce 5.5% of our annual carbon output. You don’t have to be Jonathon Porritt to work out that’s too much. The Climate Talk research identified four main areas of excessive carbon output: food, travel, lighting and shopping.

There’s a lot to say on each of these topics, so I’ll concentrate on food today and blog on the others later in the month.

According to Climate Talk, the average person will generate 26kg of CO2 from food alone over these three days; eating organic, vegetarian food and avoiding waste can reduce this by 8kg.

It’s so important not to waste food: According to Love Food Hate Waste:
“Around 20% of our climate change emissions are related to the production, processing, transportation and storage of food, but we are throwing away a third of all the food we buy. If we stopped wasting all this good food, we could have a huge impact on the environment, the equivalent of taking 1 in 5 cars off UK roads.”

Furthermore, food that we throw away generally ends up in landfill. As it rots, it produces noxious gases, which then contribute to global warming. The solution to food waste is a simple one: don’t buy food you can’t eat and if you do end up with too much, give it away to someone who can eat it.

Why is an omnivorous diet considered to be harmful to the environment? A recent paper by economist Doctor Andy Thorpe of the University of Portsmouth found that a herd of cows can belch out the annual equivalent amount of methane to the energy produced by a family car being driven 111,850 miles. Methane is more damaging to the environment than CO2, so a vegetarian or vegan diet can really help the planet. Last year the United Nations produced a report, Livestock’s Long Shadow, which identified the single most effective way we can slow down climate change: go vegetarian, or even better, go vegan.

As a vegetarian household we don’t end up with many leftovers on Boxing Day so meatless meals really do help cut down on waste, as well as being a more sustainable way to eat. We use less energy in cooking because whatever we stick in the oven takes 45 minutes maximum, compared to several hours for a turkey. Who really thinks that the best part of Christmas dinner is the turkey anyway?
If you really feel that Christmas won’t be Christmas without copious consumption of the gradually decomposing cadavers of factory farmed turkeys, take a look at this, this and this. I’ll probably be making a Mushroom Wellington in the next couple of weeks and freezing it for Christmas, but you can get plenty of ideas for vegetarian Christmas dinners on the web and if you can’t cook, there’s always nut roast. We have occasionally had a Christmas dinner of vegetables, potatoes, stuffing and Yorkshire puddings and we didn’t feel anything was missing.

I hope I don’t sound like a Christmas killjoy; I don’t want to stop people enjoying Christmas and I still intend to have a whale of a time. Combating climate change is not about munching on handfuls of raw lentils on the 25th or sapping all the fun out of Christmas; it’s about taking small steps to reduce the very real harm we are causing to the planet. We have to rethink our approach to Christmas before it’s too late, so let’s take action today and try to make a difference tomorrow.