El Niño, Your Leftovers, and the Methane Problem Hiding in Plain Sight
A limp celery stalk, a banana peel or yesterday’s rice hardly looks like a climate problem. Once those scraps disappear into the kitchen trash, most of us stop thinking about them. Yet food does not disappear when it leaves the kitchen: it enters a waste management system, and if that system ends in a landfill, the climate consequences can be surprisingly significant. That may seem far removed from El Niño, but the connection is worth examining carefully. Food waste does not cause El Niño, and composting cannot control it. El Niño is a natural Pacific Ocean-atmosphere cycle. The connection is … Continue reading