Climate Conservation Badge

The Cliamte Emergency is the biggest challenge to humans haved faced in our 100,000 year history.

Our young people are learning about the emergency and what we adults are doing to try and mitigate it’s impact.

We are not asking the young people to deal with the cliamte emergency when they grow up – their parents and grandparents were asked to do that and it’s time we stepped up to the challenge. We cannot ask another generation to clean up our mess – apart from being unfair, the climate sicentists don’t think we have time to wait another 15 years (when our Cubs become adults).

Cub Climate Conservation Booklet

We’ve designed a personal impact log book to help our young people understand the how the choices they make can change their personal impact on the world.

It also highlights that we cannot avert the crisis individually, we can’t get top zero impact the way society is currently setup – we need action from governments, councils and businesses to instigate change – to a world where we put people and planet before profit.

Sources & Notes for the Curious

As much as possible we’ve tried to pick middle-ground values (i.e. we’ve tried to avoid the extremes – beef _can_ use 20 times more energy than lentils but it doesn’t usually.

The idea is for this to be a genuinly useful, if rough, way to understand how our choices let us take control of our impact. All numbers have been rounded off to 1 decimal place to keep the maths simpler.

• Food impact per calorie: https://earthscience.stackexchange.com/questions/10160/co2-emissions-per-calorie-food
• Dairy Milk Impact: https://www.livekindly.co/dairy-milk-carbon-dioxide-plant-based-milk/
• Oat Milk Impact is printed on Oatley cartons: https://www.oatly.com/uk/products/oat-drink
• The “Mock Meat” value was roughly estimated based on this article, since there’s no consensus.
  https://www.cnbc.com/2019/09/02/beyond-meat-uses-climate-change-to-market-fake-meat-substitutes-scientists-are-cautious.html
• https://waterfootprint.org/en/water-footprint/product-water-footprint/water-footprint-crop-and-animal-products/
• https://gdrc.org/uem/footprints/water-footprint.html
• Energy to walk/cycle: https://www.brianmac.co.uk/energyexp.htm
• Average distance to travel to school: https://assets.publishing.service.gov.uk/government/uploads/system/uploads/attachment_data/file/476635/travel-to-school.pdf
• Car Travel: We’ve used the average of a Peugeot 108 (listed as the lowest emissions petrol car at 112g/km) and a 2004 Corsa (At the bottom end of the ULEZ-allowed-cars at 146g/km) to get an indicative figure.
• Car kwh was calculated based on average London mpg and speeds using this calculation. The EV energy is based on this from someone with a degree in this stuff: “The energy to move a magic car with no resistance would be approx 20% less than to move an electric car, which takes in turn 30-50% less energy than a combustion engine.”
• Electric cars kwh is based on real-world around town driving in a 2017 Renault Zoe using the onboard computer which reports an average consumption of 3.1 kwh per mile in the winter and 4 in the summer – so we’ve used 3.55.
• Possibly slightly confusingly we’ve assumed a clean energy source for charging the electric car, but assumed one of the big-six energy providers for games consoles. It’s so easy to switch to clean energy, we presume anyone who’s got an electric car has done it.
• Co2e means “Carbon Dioxide Equivalent” and is a way to measure non Co2 greenhouse emissions by their equivalent effect to co2 without having to deal with dozens of different kinds of pollution.
• Games Consoles is based on the average of the middle value for the top selection of consoles listed here: https://energyusecalculator.com/electricity_gameconsole.htm
• iPad Costs: https://www.engadget.com/2012-06-22-the-energy-required-to-charge-an-ipad.html we took the 12kwh/year, divided it by 182 (to get usage per charge) then divided by 48 (the time between the charges in the research) to get an idea of 1 hours usage.
• Games Console and Tablet Co2e are an average of the big-6: https://www.energybrokers.co.uk/news/electricity/supplier-fuel-mix-update-2021-the-big-6
• Football energy usage: https://captaincalculator.com/health/calorie/calories-burned-playing-soccer-calculator/
• Streaming video carbon emissions: https://www.iea.org/commentaries/the-carbon-footprint-of-streaming-video-fact-checking-the-headlines
• Streaming video TV kWH usage is an average of LED, LCD and OLED (skipping CRTs) from here: https://www.beupp.com/articles/tv-consumption/#Can_You_Just_Tell_Me_How_Many_Watts_Does_a_TV_Use

Further Reading

https://policy.friendsoftheearth.uk/insight/faster-deeper-and-fairer-carbon-pollution-cuts-needed