Rashid's Blog: A Place for Inquisitive Souls

A free OpenLearn course

‘You are what you eat’, goes the old adage, but what you eat also has an impact on the environment. This free course, Eating for the environment, will explore the links between food, nutrition and environmental sustainability. It will start by exploring the diversity on your dinner plate and encourage you to reflect on it in relation to dietary choices and preferences of people around the world. It will explore the connections between food, culture and traditions, and the challenges in providing healthy and nutritious food to the world’s growing population. The course will examine innovative approaches to food that also help environmental sustainability.

After studying this course, you should be able to:

• identify the diversity of ingredients on dinner plates from around the world
• list the ingredients of a dinner plate and place them on the taxonomic tree
• recognise traditional and cultural associations of…

By Alan Moran

Rio Tinto’s [Paywall] announced closure of its aluminium smelter in New Zealand due to uncompetitive power prices is a reminder of the vulnerability of Australia’s four remaining smelters, all of which face sharply higher prices courtesy of government energy policies. With energy costs comprising about a third of their total costs, smelters are industry’s bellwethers of future energy competitiveness and all four of Australia’s are on national suicide watch.

As a result of subsidies to wind and solar, these expensive and unreliable energy sources have caused high customer costs, both directly and indirectly, while also diverting the nation’s investment resources into avenues that actually damage the economy.

Commonwealth and state subsidies to wind and solar energy are running at just under $7 billion a year. $4 billion of these are as a result of requirements imposed on consumers by the Commonwealth’s Renewable Energy Target, its similar provisions…