Fixing everything, really slowly

Melanie’s Bean Sprouts blog makes for interesting reading if you are interested in practical things to help the environment. Having changed our electricity supplier last year to npower’s Juice tarif I had assumed I was buying electricity from 100% renewable sources. It turns out I’m not …

Bean Sprouts – Melanie Rimmer

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… The electricity companies’ implication is that if you’re on a green tarriff, they input as much extra renewable energy into the grid as you use (making your use effectively “green”). But this isn’t the case. In reality, the companies generate as much power as they can sell to the grid at any given time, period. So your decision to go on a “green” tarriff makes no difference to the power generated – it’s still 4.2% renewable, and nothing has changed unless the supplier is bringing new renewable plant onstream with your money. And there’s the key; most of the companies offering “green” tarriffs aren’t doing that.

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It’s not all doom and gloom though …

… if you want to change your electricity supplier because you’re concerned about climate change, it’s important to choose a supplier which invests in new renewable energy projects.

Fortunately there is a website to help you do just that. It is http://www.whichgreen.org/. I have included the latest figures from them as the image in the top left of this article. As you can see, Ecotricity comes top of the league by a long way.

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Like Melanie I’m currently using npower, which actually wasn’t too bad a few years back, but now sucks. I just wish I didn’t have to fill in a load of forms and talk to people to switch suppliers.

Pretty low I know, but …

BBC - Man cuts off penis in restaurant

A man cut off his penis with a knife in a packed London restaurant. Police were forced to use CS gas to restrain the man when they entered the Zizzi restaurant in The Strand on Sunday evening.

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It continues…

EMI have announced today that will sell non-DRM protected music through iTunes. This is fantastic news for the consumer and shows that the music industry is finally begining to understand what people (I) want and what they (me) are prepared to pay for.

According to the BBC Eric Nicoli boss of EMI said today:

“We have to trust our consumers,” he said. “We have always argued that the best way to combat illegal traffic is to make legal content available at decent value and convenient.”

Finally! Someone gets it! I just wish they had simplified the offering further:

bbc.co.uk

The higher price will apply only to single tracks that customers download. On iTunes EMI tracks free of digital rights management (DRM) software will cost $1.29 (99p).

Itunes users will be able to upgrade previously purchased EMI songs and albums for 30 cents (20p) a track.

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All EMI albums will now be free of DRM and at the higher quality with no increase in price.

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I hope they realise that charging more for the same content as an individual track, but not as an album serves only to confuse and irritate their customers. Also, why not offer existing customers a free update to the “premium” quality versions of tracks they have already bought? Why charge more for DRM free content? What makes EMI content more special than any other labels content?

I’ll be very interested to see how the other labels and music stores react to this announcement. I really hope they all follow suit and quickly. Then we can worry about the real issue in the music business: cutting out the middle man and giving musicians and consumers a fair deal. Something tells me the major labels wont be so keen to let that happen!

Aaron Cohen

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Following on from Australia’s pledge to phase out the usage of incandescent bulbs, the 27 leaders of the European Union have decided that all member states will have to use energy efficient lighting before 2010 (yes, that’s just 3 years away). The switchover, which will affect all of the EU’s 470 million+ citizens, was developed with the aim of meeting targets to reduce energy usage by 20 percent by 2020: to that end, a commission will be accepting proposals for enabling the switchover “for office and street lighting to be adopted by 2008 and on incandescent lamps and other forms of lighting in private households by 2009.”

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Great to see that the low hanging fruit is finally being plucked. Aaron’s blog is well worth reading if you are interested in the enviroment and a perspective of what my employer (Sun Microsystems) is doing about energy efficiency.

Guardian
At the high court earlier today, Mr Justice Sullivan granted the environmental group Greenpeace an order quashing the government’s decision to build new nuclear power stations.

Greenpeace had accused the government of reneging on its promise to carry out “the fullest consultation” before making its decision.

It said the government failed to present clear proposals and information on key issues surrounding a new generation of nuclear plants, such as the disposal of radioactive waste and the financial costs of building new plants.

Mr Justice Sullivan said the consultation document gave every appearance of being simply an “issues paper”.

It contained no actual proposals and, even if it had, the information given to consultees was “wholly insufficient for them to make an intelligent response”.

The information given on waste was “not merely inadequate but also misleading”.

Sarah North, the head of Greenpeace’s nuclear campaign, said: “The government’s so-called consultation on nuclear power was obviously a sham, and we’re pleased that the judge has agreed with us … They’ve now been forced back to the drawing board to conduct a proper and lengthy review.”

I’m opposed to Nuclear power. Working day to day with computer systems I know that if technology can go wrong, it will. If that technology is inheriantly dangerous and there are safer alternatives we shouldn’t use them. Moreover if the safer technologies need improvements before they are efficient at larger scales then lets spend government money on improving them and selling them to the rest of the world!

I went to a really good event on Tuesday night to launch the results from Forum for the Future’s Future leaders survey. I met several great people. One of whom, Sebastian Wood, told me about his new startup business Better Generation which advises on saving energy and generating electricity at home. They have a shop which sells energy saving light bulbs and the power saving plug I mentioned a while ago.

Great to meet people who understand there is a good business to be made from saving energy and the environment.

If like me you are always missing out on seeing your favorite bands becuase you only hear about the gig then it is in the news for selling out in 15 minutes then you need tourfilter. You give it a list of bands you like and where you live, it emails you when they tickets are on sale. It works really really well (provided you live in a city that is supported).

Check out the ical feed which lets you see the gigs in your own calendar if it supports it (try using sunbird/lightning if you don’t use iCal on Mac).

I just watched “The Devil and Daniel Johnston” on TV and it moved me almost as much as when I saw it at the Cinema. If you’ve not seen it I highly recommend you try and see it, just make sure you are in a pretty good mood before you do see it!I’m sure his life is summarised elsewhere, so I shan’t repeat it hear, but the film raises so many issues about mental illness, faith, organised religion, parenting, love, music, the music industry, American society…

It’s just really, really good.

Hmm, maybe I should stear clear of film reviews

Happy new year all!

I’ve just offset all the carbon emmisions from my flights last year (London to Florida for work, London to Madrid for work and London to Croatia for holiday). You should consider doing the same. I used carbonneutral.com and it was easy and informative. They explain it far better than I can:

www.carbonneutral.com

One single shorthaul flight produces roughly the same amount of the global warming gas as 3 months worth of driving a 1.4 litre car. And we’re all flying more.

You can’t do much about the fuel efficiency of aircraft, but if you need a holiday or if you’re travelling on business, you can help reduce your personal contribution to global warming by making your flight CarbonNeutral. That means we organise for the CO2 associated with your flight to be ‘balanced out’ by forestry and climate friendly energy projects which save equivalent amounts of CO2.

Now if I could only find the courage to claim the offset costs for the work flights

As has been discussed in comments on my “light bulb action” posting devices such as TV’s, DVD players and set top boxes that are in standby mode rather than switched off waste power. This wasted power costs you money and generation of that power most likely released carbon dioxide into the atmosphere.

The simple solution to this problem is to turn devices off at the wall socket (if your countries power socket standard includes a switch). The problem is this is a pain, and being lazy I rarely bother to do this. So I was pleased to learn about the following products which save me the effort of turning devices off myself:

And this one:

These devices have one special socket and then two or five normal ones. The special socket can detect whether the connected device is switched on or off turns and the other sockets are controlled automatically. I’ve set this up in our living room to test it. I was annoyed that the Cable TV box was always left on when the TV was turned off. I plugged our TV into the special socket and the cable box into one of the others.

I found it to be really good. It doesn’t matter if I turn the TV off using the remote (putting the TV into standby mode) or using the actual power on/off switch on the TV the one click device detects that the TV is switched off and turns off the cable box.

One word of caution is that our cable box takes about 2 minutes to boot up from power off (because it is the cheap one the cable company gave us). This can be really annoying if you turn on the TV wanting to watch something specific. So clearly you need to think about how you will use this device before you get one, but I think its a very simple and useful product.
I bought mine from QuietPC because I was buying other things at the time, but you can also get them from Maplins and no doubt other places.

To find out more about how it works the website is here: http://www.oneclickpower.co.uk/. For international readers this UK only product probably isn’t much use to you. I’ve found a similar product for the US market, I’m sure there are others (please leave a comment with a link if you know of one).