Posts by Frank Holleman

I’m working on a cookbook for climate change but I refuse to calculate how much kg C02 someone would save with a meal. It’s just too little. Looking at the numbers, it doesn’t seem to make a difference. But the impact is not primarily in the numbers. It’s in the chain reaction.

The richer you are, the bigger your environmental footprint. The other bad news is that the rich lifestyle of the West is what people in other countries are dreaming of. Buying more stuff is a problem, also in a circular economy with hyper-efficiency. The real answer is breaking free from consumerism. That is not a groundbreaking…

Recently an older man told me about his showers. As a kid, he would sometimes go to the bathhouse with his brother. You could take a hot shower for 15 cents. After 10 minutes of pure luxury, someone would knock on the door because time was over. “What a time. Well, as I’ve always said…

In a faraway corner of China, there is a secret lake. A lake that shall not be named, a black hole with toxic waste. A BBC reporter called it ‘hell on Earth’. It exists for one reason only: mining the materials that create our smartphones. [1] The factories around the lake mine huge amounts of…

The map of the world is a lie. The version most people know was designed by sailors in the 17th century, so they could draw straight lines across the ocean. But to achieve this they had to stretch the size of continents. The Earth is a ball and drawing it as a flat map is…