Latest Eco updates and help 

This month a few updates on stories I’ve written about in past newsletters.

1.  Last month I wrote about rising food prices, global shortages of certain products and food waste and just this weekend a BBC article caught my eye, entitled “The £5.30 orange juice that tells the story of why supermarket prices are sky high”.  Drought, disease and flooding are all to blame.

2.  Earlier this year I wrote about AI’s consumption of electricity and water.  I’ve read two articles recently, one from the BBC suggesting that we need to see AI’s energy demands in context - roughly 0.25% of global electricity demand in the past year, and the other from The Guardian, noting that companies such as Microsoft, Google, OpenAI, Amazon and Meta are pouring hundreds of billions of dollars into new data centres, which could account for more than 14% of the US’s total power demand by 2030, triple the amount it does now. Utilities predict that the same volume of electricity it would take to power six cities will be required just to keep data centres online by this time.

3. And an update on plastics, which sadly are still being burned, causing further pollution.  At the latest round of UN Global Plastics Treaty talks ended… without a treaty.  World leaders failed once again to reach an agreement that limits plastic production -I would still like us to collect flexible plastics at home and at church but ideally we need to think about what we buy and what kind of packaging it comes in.  Can we reuse containers for anything else?  Do you need a packet of crisps every lunchtime?  Should I really buy fizzy water?And finally, as a nation of committed tea and coffee drinkers since the seventeenth century, I encourage you to buy Fairtrade for home use and to take your reusable cup when you’re out.  As you might expect, Co-op and Waitrose are the best own brands to buy while Cafedirect does well on Ethical Consumer’s score table.

As we continue to care for the environment at St James, I would love it if there were others who fancied writing a newsletter or who might come together to spearhead our environmental strategy in the future – please let me know.
 
Prayer
God our Creator, who laid the foundations of the earth and stretched out the heavens as a tent cloth; how glorious is your name in all the world.  Give us grace to wonder at your gift, to treasure the earth and to work for its protection and renewal; through Jesus Christ your Son, our Lord. Amen.
More prayers here: https://arocha.org.uk/get-involved/pray/