Thanksgiving: Before and After Impacts on the Environment and Climate Change

Before, we’ll travel. After, we’ll dump our food. Thanksgiving - the biggest day of waste.

The Holidays are upon us in the United States and consumption of energy, food and oil will peak leading up to the days of Thanksgiving. Beforehand, enormous amounts of fuel will be consumed as people travel by car, train, and airplane to see loved ones. Afterwards, Americans will spend the same amount of fuel to get back and their food wastes will lay mountains in landfills. Thanksgiving is an expensive holiday, on pocketbooks and the environment. Before and after: Thanksgiving's examined effect on climate change.

Transportation's heavy toll on the planet peaks during the Thanksgiving weekend. 32 million Americans will travel +50 miles to get to their destinations, 2.3 million will fly, and others will bus or take the train (AAA, 2009). Unfortunately the best mode of transportation is the least used, as examined through the work of Mikhail Chester and Arpad Hovath (UC Berkeley), as reported by Jacob Leibenluft of the Lantern (Nov. 2008). Their findings reveal train transportation as the best vehicle to ride: "Riding in the average train is a significantly greener choice than the average car or plane" and trains (averaging 155 passengers) produce less than half the amount of GhG's per mile compared with a sedan with the average 1.58 passengers (Slate, 2008). Trains are only better for the environment if they are stocked with passengers, an unlikely situation most days of the year. The researchers find that airplanes emit more carbon than trains or buses per passenger mile. When calculating the life-cycle of transportation methods, the amounts of concrete emissions play a significant role, too. As Leibenluft puts it: "It's not just the road you take, but what it's made out of," that counts.

The biggest American feast day is also the biggest American waste day. Jonathan Bloom, from Culinate blog, recently wrote about the problems of food waste: "More than 40 percent of all food produced in America is not eaten, according to research by former University of Arizona anthropologist Timothy Jones. That amounts to more than 29 million tons of food waste each year, or enough to fill the Rose Bowl every three days." The US wastes 25% of food prepared, the EPA reports (2009). Waste is revealed in the monumental levels of energy used to plant, fertilize, harvest, package, transport, and eventually dump food into landfills. These energy expenditures represent emissions, which are then compounded with the methane produced when these foodstuffs rot.

Food and transportation's biggest day is approaching. Trains are the greenest vehicles of travel, however the infrastructure of many states is inadequate. The interstate's miles of traffic will be the choice for many. Food waste is equally inevitable. Thanksgiving doesn't have to be so threatening to climate change. Planning is needed to ensure that cities provide the needed institutions to protect our planet and a cherished tradition.

Venus and the Run-Away Greenhouse Effect

The runaway greenhouse effect: So hot all the ocean's waters evaporate. So hot the carbon in rocks evaporate.

The surface of the planet so hot it could melt lead; a surface so hot that it would evaporate rock. Venus represents a greenhouse effect gone wrong, as life is unsustainable with its climate so harsh. Mars, Venus, and Earth each provide the examples of the importance of the greenhouse effect. Mars lacks a sizable greenhouse effect. Earth has the perfect greenhouse effect for life, however long that will remain true is in hot debate. And Venus in one word: hot.

Venus, at 467 degrees C is called Earth's sister planet because Venus is 95% the size of the Earth, has a rocky crust, and similar iron-nickel core. In the early years, 4.6M years ago, they both had water. They were practically twins, except for a few key traits. For starters, Venus doesn’t have a strong magnetic field like the Earth’s, an important distinction that will be examined shortly. Next, Venus is much closer to the sun so naturally it warrants higher temperatures. These days the two planets couldn't be further apart; Venus is a hot ball of carbon dioxide and sulfur clouds void of water and life. It owes its fate to a runaway greenhouse effect.

The Runaway Greenhouse Effect: initially there was water vapor. Solar radiation contains pure light and radiant heat, so it can easily pass through water vapor and other greenhouse gases of the atmosphere. Once this solar radiation (light) hits the planet, some of the light is reflected back out into space and a portion is transformed into Infrared Radiation that also tries to reflect back into space. When infrared radiation hits a greenhouse gas it is absorbed and turned into heat.

As mentioned earlier, Venus had water in the form of vapor (there was never liquid water). The sun's UV rays hit the water vapor providing enough energy to separate the hydrogen atoms from the oxygen atom. Since hydrogen makes the lightest gas it can escape the atmosphere, and in Venus's case, solar winds swept this component of water for good. In contrast, the Earth has a protective Ozone layer to keep the UV out just above the cold trap (layer of the atmosphere that freezes water if it travels too high, therefore sending it back to earth). Continual heat trapping allowed Venus to be so hot it could melt carbon rocks and eventually evaporate carbon into the atmosphere. The effect was so strong that today CO2 is 95% of Venus' atmosphere.

The greenhouse effect is essential to life. Mars is too cold and Venus too hot; the Earth is just right, for now. It would now take only 5 months to get to Venus via spaceship, or about a third of the duration of when Magellan's Spanish Galleons circumnavigated the globe. Even though Venus is 400M miles away, we're closer to it than ever before. Hopefully we'll stay as far away from its climate and runaway greenhouse effect.