“Basil, Rocket or Thyme?” asked David Donde (below), the guru of authenticity in a fedora behind Truth Coffee at his HQ next door to Mavericks in Cape Town, the coffee capital of SA. If the police station was not in the next block or this was Denver or Amsterdam, perhaps marijuana would have also been on the menu. For the hip contribution to resolving global warming was revealed this morning: disposable coffee mugs that become herb gardens thanks to a band of seeds from Growingpaper, a green shoot company which has sprouted in the Swartland.

The statistics are scary: one takeaway coffee cup a year creates one ton of waste, clears 30 square metres of forest and adds 10 Kg of carbon to the atmosphere. There is now more carbon dioxide in the atmosphere than at any time in the last 800,000 years thanks to studies of bubbles in ice mined in Greenland for trendy mineral water like Berg (below). Earlier this month CO2 powered through the 400 parts per million ceiling as compared to 315 when I was born and it’s all due to human activity.

All this CO2 is bad news for the climate. Back in 1824 Joseph Fourier hypothesized (using the analogy of a bell jar rather than a greenhouse) that the end result would be global warming and he’s not wrong: since 1988 nearly every year has been the hottest on record which is bad news for those of us located in the toasty parts of the planet or in low lying regions that will soon revert back to Neptune as sea levels rise. So instead of rearranging deckchairs on the Titanic, I can look forward to a delicious rocket salad with basil aïoli.