Barend Vlaardingerbroek: Coming to grips with the real culprit in climate change

Leafy greens are leading culprits in climate change through their excessive production of the principal greenhouse gas water vapour and should be banned 

Water vapour is Earth's most abundant greenhouse gas. It's responsible for about half of Earth's greenhouse effect — the process that occurs when gases in Earth's atmosphere trap the Sun's heat.   – Google (original emphasis)

All this prattle about carbon dioxide and methane is just a distraction. Google goes on to state that water vapour can make up 4% of the atmosphere. That’s 100X the concentration of CO₂!

If we are going to get serious about the threat of climate change, we must take firm measures to prevent water vapour from entering the atmosphere.

The main source of water vapour is the oceans and there is also a considerable input from lakes and rivers. There is not much we can do to impede these sources, although a scientific committee could be set up to ascertain how effective damming rivers to create deep lakes would be in order to reduce their total surface areas and thereby their evaporatory loss. The second source of water vapour is plants through the process of transpiration that we all learned about at high school – the loss of water vapour from the leaves. We must therefore reduce the total amount of vegetation on Earth, particularly vegetation with a high leaf surface area.

Copious amounts of water vapour are pumped into the air by the world’s tropical rain forests, particularly the Amazon. Putting a stop to this would be simple and inexpensive, indeed even profitable – open these forests up to wholesale logging.

Back at home, we exacerbate the transpiration problem by growing greens with inordinately high leaf areas, such as silverbeet. What we can and should do is introduce a water vapour emission fee (WVEF) calculated on the basis of leaf surface area per kilogram. Silverbeet would attract a whopping WVEF while spuds would attract a low one. A government committee could even consider a rebate system whereby WVEF fees from the high-emissions veges would subsidise the cost of low-emission veges.

Transpiration, while a natural process, is also anthropogenic in that it is people rather than Nature who plant fields of veges such as silverbeet. Other anthropogenic sources of water vapour include the combustion of fossil fuels – burning fuel produces both water vapour and carbon dioxide – and the drying of clothes.

We already have a carbon emissions fee on motor vehicles and this could be expanded to include a WVEF. As for drying clothes, electrically-powered driers should ideally be banned outright as they also exacerbate CO₂ production through the electricity that needs to be produced to operate them where that electricity is produced through non-renewal means. However, this would be detrimental to businesses such as commercial laundries and hotels. A better approach would be to discourage the use of driers by metering them and charging for the power they use (and thereby the water vapour they produce) on an ascending scale.

The real problem here is not, of course, the drying process itself – clothes hung out on a clothes line to dry also pump water into the air – but the existence of wet clothes following a wash. If it costs a bomb to get clothes washed and dried, people will be encouraged to wear their clothes for longer between washes. Research into single-use clothing materials should be instigated through the provision of targeted research funding, and such innovations as clothes made of paper should be subsidised. More people should be discouraged from wearing clothes at all by promoting and publicly financing nudist organisations – Crown bushland could be put aside for nudist camps and perhaps even colonies.

A significant anthropogenic activity in this context is water vapour production through respiration and perspiration. Now that people are accustomed to wearing masks, we need to look into impregnating masks with materials such as silica gel that absorb water vapour. Once saturated, these materials could be buried. Involvement in physical activity that causes perspiration needs to be curbed through public education programmes about the environmental perils of playing sports and undertaking strenuous exercise.

No more avoiding the real issue, folks. It’s time to put our shoulders to the wheel and save the planet!

Barend Vlaardingerbroek is a retired academic who is now contemplating a career as a comedian.