32 Degrees. From the summer of Doha to the summer of Buenos Aires. The only difference is that it’s supposed to be summer down here. It’s a strange idea that you have to go through all this heat to get down to Antarctica.

One of the students asked me if there was a way to make CO2 into a solid, why worry about all that gas flying all over the place. I’ve been told that there’s a tower that does exactly that. It uses solar energy to separate out the CO2 from gas streams and makes it into a lump of harmless carbon. Of course a tomato plant does the same thing only in the end you get a lump of tasty carbon.

Another one of the questions I’ve been asked is how does it make sense for us to go out of our way to protect the environment. The idea is that conserving or protecting the environment is something extra that we should be doing and that there is some kind of trade-off involved with protecting it (so if we protect the environment we’ll make less money for example). So (according to wikipedia) from the very beginning of its history, environmental movements have always looked to the impact of a better environment on human beings. Apparently some of the earliest writings on environmentalism were by Arab doctors centuries ago. They were mainly concerned with the effects of air pollution on human health. Here’s the abstract.

It’s probably more useful to think of the environment as a key factor in our development and not as something extra. This is becoming especially true, as our economic activities and growth have taken us to the limits of what nature can sustainably provide. We’re running out of everything: energy, air and water. At the same time we are demanding more and more of everything: energy air and water.

The challenge of sustainable development is to save nature by learning how to make the most of it. There’s a website www.zeri.org that has some really interesting case studies on how this can work. A lot of the leading companies in the world including carpet manufactures, delivery services, chemical and oil companies are making a lot of money by figuring out ways to run their businesses more sustainably, by planting tomatoes instead of towers.

This is another interesting way to look at sustainable development…. You can just wiki natural capitalism.

Ok, enough of that for now. I’m off to Ushuaia.

Man the mosquitoes in Buenos Aires are huge.