Go green to save the planet… and £80,000

Published on Tuesday 22 January 2008 21:02

LIVING an environmentally friendly lifestyle can save more than £80,000 and cut carbon emissions by nearly 900 tonnes, a scientist will tell a group of schoolchildren today.

Dr David Reay, who is giving the opening speech of the second annual James Clerk Maxwell Lecture Series at the Edinburgh Academy, has calculated how different choices over a lifetime can have a radical effect on a person's impact on the planet and their finances.

A fairly affluent western person who is "ignorant" of climate change might produce 1,251 tonnes of greenhouse gases, costing 131,000.

However, a similar person who lives a "climate-aware" life might produce just 370 tonnes at a cost of 48,845, a saving of 881 tonnes of emissions and 82,155.

The lecture is the first of four talks on climate change in the series, which will be followed by a "question time" session featuring politicians from the Scottish Conservatives, Labour, the SNP and the Liberal Democrats and an audience of pupils invited from every secondary school in Edinburgh.

Dr Reay, of Edinburgh University, said: "What I really want to do is show the students how they can play a part.

"If you take one person making a difference and multiply that by the school, it adds up to a large amount of greenhouse gases saved."

To make his case, Dr Reay uses two characters, "Aware Amy" and "Greedy George" – right – to illustrate the impact of leading a green or environmentally unfriendly lifestyle.

He said he decided that "people power" was the way forward in 2001 when George Bush, the United States president, withdrew his country from the Kyoto climate-change treaty.

Dr Reay added: "Ever since then, I've believed we cannot just leave this to governments, we cannot wait for George Bush to go out of power, or get a new prime minister. All of us have to starting tackling this today.

"I do all the normal things you hear about. I have energy- efficient appliances, (my family and I] have got solar panels on our house, we holiday in Scotland and try to source locally produced food. We compost, have a worm farm, which the kids always like seeing, and we recycle. We wear extra jumpers in the winter.

"Our lifestyle is very much a comfortable one. You don't have to be living on a hill, eating berries and chanting to tackle climate change."

David Standley, the deputy rector of the Edinburgh Academy, said climate change was chosen as the theme of the lecture series partly because he "felt very strongly there's a lot of biased ignorance on both sides of the environmental debate".

"There are some serious questions to answer, many of which I am ignorant about and I feel I need to know more," he said, citing biofuels as a difficult issue.

Mr Standley added: "I'm pushing retirement, decisions about the environment aren't going to affect my generation, but the kids in our school are going to be affected, so I feel they have a right to challenge those decisions."