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Climate scientist faces sack for refusing to fly to Germany from Solomon Islands archipelago
(www.theguardian.com)
this post was submitted on 05 Oct 2023
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This is the best summary I could come up with:
A climate researcher has been threatened with the sack by his employer after refusing to fly back to Germany at short notice after finishing fieldwork on Bougainville in the Solomon Islands archipelago.
On Friday, Dr Gianluca Grimalda, an environmental campaigner who refuses to fly on principle, was told by his employer, Germany’s Kiel Institute for World Economy, that if he was not at his desk on Monday he would no longer have a job to return to.
Instead this week he was still waiting in Buka Town, Bougainville, to embark on a cargo ship to begin his journey back to Europe, after six months studying the impact of climate change and globalisation on communities in Papua New Guinea.
While conducting his fieldwork among the Papuans, Grimalda gave dozens of talks on the science of climate breakdown, explaining to islanders how the carbon emissions of the industrialised world were causing the disasters they faced.
But he says he faced a number of unavoidable delays, including being held for ransom by machete-wielding bandits, thefts of his research items and difficulties getting communities to speak to him.
Fabian Dablander, postdoctoral researcher at the Institute for Biodiversity and Ecosystem Dynamics at the University of Amsterdam, said: “What Gianluca is doing is a deeply inspiring act of breaking with business as usual.
The original article contains 749 words, the summary contains 217 words. Saved 71%. I'm a bot and I'm open source!
offtopic, but can anyone show me how to use this bot to summarize articles for my own needs ? thank you
Arguably he should be flying, he is trying to do something about the problem.
Stacey taking a gap year to find herself should be the one hitching a ride on a cargo ship.
Man of honor!
If his alternative was boat, from what I've read, they aren't really better...
That's common misinformation you've heard. Sure, the global footprint of cargo ships is very high. But if you look at the CO2 per ton-kilometer, even the dirty ships are 20-30x more efficient than brand new airplanes.
Ships emit a lot globally because they carry an insane amount of cargo around. There's just no way whatsoever to carry as much on planes.
But we're talking about passengers, not cargo, so the relevant numbers are CO2 per passenger-km.
Which changes the efficiency - because while you can cram people tightly for a 12h flight, you can't do that for a few weeks journey.
https://travelandclimate.org/transport-calculations
https://www.theguardian.com/travel/2006/dec/20/cruises.green
Not when you're hitching a ride on a cargo ship, no, like the person you're replying to said.
But that's not a real alternative - you can't redirect all isn't traffic to hitch a ride in cargo ships.
It should also be noted that, due to absurd economies of scale, international production can often still be more environmentally efficient than local production for some items, even if they have to be shipped halfway across the world.
IMO the main problem with cargo ships is that the bunker oil they use is super dirty (in terms of NOx, SOx, and particulate emissions), not that it's inefficient in terms of CO2 per ton-kilometer. (That said, there's still room for improvement on the latter, by using sails -- either the traditional kind or the newfangled computer-controlled kite sails.)
Sounds more like he was hitching a ride on a cargo ship that was already going that direction.