Climate Change is Real! We Took Action! What About You?

Thanks to Greta now everyone is at the moment talking about climate change which is so important, but honestly:

What have you personally in particular recently done to protect our climate? 

Growing up and living in the center of Europe, having everything I need and having the possibility to consume whatever I desire, certainly doesn’t make it easy to forego these amenities.

We are consistently overloaded with advertising about things we should have, but we mostly do not need any of these products. This is one of the reasons why we decided to act consciously and carefully with our environment.

We changed these 7 climate-damaging habits to protect our planet

We have reconsidered our routines and our buying behavior and have taken the following seven measures to contribute to climate protection:

1. We stopped buying Avocados

In the beginning, this measurement was awful for Jojo, as she loves Avocados. She nearly had eaten them every day. But we all need to learn to dispense with habits that harm the climate because if no one is changing its habits, nothing will happen or even everything will become worse.

Avocado production requires tons of water and obviously they have long ways to travel until we have them on our plate in Europe. Also, mostly the producers in Mexico are suppressed by Mexican cartels. There is also, unfortunately, a lot of violence around Avocado production.

They are celebrated as healthy superfoods, but you can easily replace them with regional and seasonal vegetables from your surroundings. That also applies to other fruits and vegetables produced and transported thousands of kilometers to your hometown.

Take Action against climate change:

Don’t understand me wrong, you can eat everything you want, but just be aware that if it is not regional and/or seasonal produced it should not happen on a daily basis. And this is what we all – without any exception – have to understand and learn.

2. We became ‘Climatarians’ to fight climate change

I love meat and I have eaten meat or products consisting of meat nearly twice or three times a day. Well, and that is the problem. This is almost the standard diet in Germany or Austria. If you do not believe me, have a look at the meat consumption statistics: Austrians in 2018 consumed on average 64,1 kg meat per person.

Eating that amount of meat has a bad impact on our climate:

Firstly, the production of one kilogram of beef, for instance, requires 16.000 liters of water! This is way too much. I couldn’t have ever imagined, and I was shocked when I heard that. Especially in times of global warming, we have to save our drinking water the best we can. In Addition, animals in mass stock breading are mostly treated very bad which made eating meat for me also become a moral issue. There are a lot of shocking and disgusting videos from NGOs like PETA out there.

Furthermore, according to Greenpeace, the global animal farming is one of the biggest perpetrators of greenhouse gases. In other words, livestock farming is 20% responsible for global warming!

Now consider, that everyone in the world is eating meat just twice a week. You cannot imagine what an impact that would be on saving CO2 emissions. 

Take Action against climate change:

I became vegetarian for all these reasons and I am not regretting it at all! I feel so much healthier, more focused, sleep better and I definitely have more energy. 

Same thing here with the Avocados, eat whatever you want, but be aware where it comes from and what an impact it has on the greenhouse gases. 

If you try to avoid eating meat maybe one or two days a week, the result would be extraordinarily good for our planet. Your personal health will additionally thank you as well.

3. A full bath should be the exception

A daily full bath of hot water is not saving our climate. Jojo loves her bathtub and her full baths. Especially after a stressful working day during the cold and dark winter time she took a bath nearly every day. But she has rethought her behavior and only takes full baths on special occasions now.

Take Action against climate change:

In order to counteract climate change, we have to become aware of our actions and each of us has to take small steps against it. That means: deliberately avoiding the usual conveniences, such as a daily full bath, for climate protection.

4. Is your energy provider green?

For years we have an energy provider that produces 100% green electricity.

In addition, it is even cheaper than the standard provider!

There are tons of comparison portals supporting you to find the best provider. In Austria, I use tools such as e-control or durchblicker.

It requires just a few minutes entering your information and the providers do the rest for you.

Take Action:

Take these few minutes, research, check and compare your providers and change to green energy.

You will save a lot of money and you will contribute to saving our climate with almost no effort!

5. Repairing instead of throwing away means climate protection

We started to repair our broken things instead of throwing away them and buying new ones. This is also a very important step to protect the climate.

Unfortunately, we grew up in a throwaway society. If for example jeans or shoes were broken we threw them away and bought a new pair which is so sad as every thrown away product cost valuable resources.

Recently, the batterie of my shaver was nearly done, so I ordered a new batterie and watched a DIY youtube tutorial on how to replace it. I could have bought a new shaver and throw the old one away but I wanted to repair it as everything else was fine.

Sometimes it is not that easy to do it yourself but there are special shops focused on repairing electronics or other things, just do some research! In Vienna, for example, there is a repairing network.

We also bring our broken cloth to the tailor, broken shoes to the shoemaker. Another advantage is that we support local businesses!

Take Action and repair your broken things:

Consider if you really need to throw away broken things directly! There are so many repairing professionals out there, just do some research or try it on your own watching Do-It-Yourself videos on youtube. Actually, it feels very rewarding when you have it repaired on your own, believe me!

Repairing obviously means climate protection!

6. We take the train and public transport whenever possible to prevent climate change

We have a car and honestly, it is pure luxury in a city like Vienna where the public transport system is one of the best in the entire world. But as we are not living in the city center but a little bit outside we sometimes need a car.

However, we let the car in the garage as much as we can. Also, when we go somewhere further we firstly check the train connection. Traveling on a train is usually very relaxing! You can read, work, sleep, watch videos or really use the traveling time for your projects instead of driving a car through thousands of traffic jams.

7. Mindfulness for climate topics on a daily basis

We all have to start being mindful of climate topics on a daily basis. Every tiny little step will help! It starts with natural things such as:

• Switching off lights in rooms where you don’t use them.
• Avoiding disposable tableware at takeaways by eating in or bringing your own reusable boxes.
• Avoiding disposable cups by bringing your own reusable cups.
• Stay away from plastic packaging as far as possible.
• Buying regional and seasonal (organic) fruits and vegetables.
• Supporting local and sustainable businesses such as our favorite organic herbs and tea supplier SONNENTOR or Carry Bottles made of recycled glass.
• Disconnect your charging cables! They consume electricity like a dripping tap.
• Avoiding fast fashion.
• And many more…

Conclusion

After reading this post my granny would say: This is how we have lived for over eighty years – nothing new in this post for me: We never ate avocados, we grew our veggies seasonal in the garden; After the 2nd world war we had meat maximum once a month and grandfather always repaired almost everything. We mostly took the train as we didn’t own a car when we were young. Sunday was a full bath day and the entire family used the hot water. We always switched the light off, sometimes we didn’t have electricity at all. And so on..

It could be so easy if we always keep in mind that we have to take care of our natural resources!

We know that our influence on the climate is very high here in privileged Europe. Nevertheless, we must all consciously and carefully counteract our climate-damaging habits and set a signal together so that our earth remains beautiful and habitable in the future!