Climate change seems to be on everyone’s lips these days, with fewer people denying its existence than ever before.
Bristol prides itself on being a green city, even winning European Green City in 2015. As with most major towns and cities though, being green isn’t easy.
In my opinion, private transport of one kind or another is here to stay. Hopefully it will become more environmentally friendly with more electric cars, buses, trucks and trains coming into use but anyone expecting people to give up their private cars full stop will have a long wait.
I believe most people want the best for our planet. After all, it is home to over seven billion human beings and 130 billion mammals so we would be fools not to.
Unfortunately the world does have some fools though. And some of them in powerful positions.
With fires raging across the Amazon, which is considered by many scientists to be the lungs of the planet, many climate change deniers are ignorant of the facts.
Antarctica is now losing six times more ice every year than it was in the 1980s, when it was losing about 40 gigatons a year (one gigaton is a billion tonnes).
Since around 2010 it has been losing 252 gigatons over the same 12-month period. Dumping that volume of ice into the ocean has already raised sea levels everywhere.
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Antarctica is a huge area. So much so that it exerts its own gravity field.
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When I read that President Donald Trump and President Xi Jinping of China were both eyeing Greenland, I wondered why.
It occurred to me that as the ice melts, access to valuable minerals which lay below will be easier and cheaper to access.
With China gobbling up much of the world's resources, it's easy to see why it might decide that waiting for ice to melt is cheaper and easier than excavating vast areas of mountain ranges to create quarries.
The Greenland Ice Sheet, if fully melted, could raise sea levels by nearly six metres. How would Weston-super-Mare, Clevedon or Severn Beach cope with that?
Greenland is the worlds largest island and is located between the Arctic and Atlantic oceans. It is owned by Denmark but operates autonomously.
In a sense though, it actually belongs to all of us. The seat of government is situated in the capital city Nuuk, which has a population of nearly 18,000.
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There are no roads between cities in Greenland so Mr Trump will no doubt need to use Air Force One to get around.
Every one mile of flight would add around 53 pounds of carbon dioxide to the atmosphere and there are of course thousands of miles across Greenland.
It’s interesting to note that Greenland is 4,843 miles from China and 3,018 miles from the USA so not exactly local for either.