Sarah Bridle on the carbon footprint of food

The Life Scientific

BBC

Society & Culture, Personal Journals, Science

4.6 • 1.4K Ratings

🗓️ 2 March 2021

⏱️ 28 minutes

🔗️ Recording | iTunes | RSS

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Summary

What would happen to our carbon emissions if we all went vegan? Astrophysicist, Sarah Bridle tells Jim Al-Khalili why she switched her attention from galaxies to food. A rising star in the study of extra-galactic astronomy, Sarah was a driving force behind one of the most ambitious astronomy projects of recent times, the Dark Energy Survey of the universe. A few years ago, she started trying to calculate the carbon emissions from different foods so that she could make more informed choices about what she was eating in terms of the impact they were having on climate change. Before long, she was adapting the statistical tools and techniques she had developed to study dark matter and dark energy, to quantify the carbon cost of different foods and lobby government to make food labels indicating carbon cost of foods compulsory. Producer: Anna Buckley

Transcript

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0:25.6	To get you ready for today's conversations, newscast,
0:29.3	listen on BBC Sounds.
0:32.4	Hello, today I'll be finding out how changing our diet could help to save the planet.
0:38.1	What would happen to greenhouse gas emissions if we all went vegan?
0:42.2	And why did a rising star in the study of extra galactic astronomy turn her attention to food?
0:50.0	BBC Sounds, Music, Radio, Podcasts.
0:53.6	My guest on the life scientific today has had a glittering academic career
0:57.7	into very different areas of science, astrophysics and agriculture.
1:03.0	Sarah Bridal is a professor in deep breath, the extra galactic astronomy and cosmology research
1:09.2	group in the Jodderall Bank Centre for Astrophysics, part of the University of Manchester.
1:13.6	She's spent much of her career trying to understand something so subtle that we can't
1:18.6	feel, see or hear it.
1:20.5	You see, she's a world authority on the dark arts.
1:23.6	Well, on the nature of what scientists call dark matter and dark energy.
1:28.2	Between 2005 and 2015, she led one of the four teams that were involved in the dark energy survey.
	...

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