Fixing everything, really slowly

This explains why the Morrisons supermarket I stopped at in Bridgwater on Sunday had so many Bioethanol pumps:

http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/business/4498934.stm

and

http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/business/4603272.stm

Its an interesting option to reduce carbon emissions, although I think there a better options for cars and other land based transportation (Electricty or Hydrogen fuel cells). Where this has to make a difference is comercial airlines. Virgin’s recent announcement I posted about last week seems to be aiming to do this so I’m glad that work always flies Virgin to the US.

In a few years I would hope that I only need to offset 15% of the carbon emissions of a flight becuase the other 85% came from Bioethanol :-

The heading says it all. I now have a new pair of glasses for “VDU work” as the optician told me. I bought them from Vision Express near Monument tube in London.

For someone who has never had their eyes tested or worn glasses before I found the service to be a little lacking. I wasn’t really put at ease, and I found the atmosphere (including the bad dance music playing in the store) more like that of a gym than somewhere that trained specialists measure the defects with my vision. Individual staff members were polite but didn’t actually give the impression that they had sold a pair of glasses before (perhaps the fact that I work in the city but don’t wear a suit unsettled them )

Having spent over £200 pounds on them I’m reasonably happy with the results. I’m wearing them now, as I type and am finding things fairly normal. I’m keen to see how I feel about them by the end of the day, that was when the symptoms that drove me to the opticians used to occur the most.

Tip: If you find yourself making the fonts bigger in your web browser in order to read articles on a regular basis go get an eye test! I took me a few years to make the connection!)

Update: I guess I should have mentioned what is wrong with my eyes! I have an Astigmatism

Reuters: California sues carmakers over global warming
Ok, so this came from Slashdot but I thought it was a good headline. Of course it turns out the this is just political game playing but still its progress, just really slowly

Update: Ok, so this even better news:

BBC: Branson makes $3bn climate pledge

Will people actually start to take this seriously?

This is such an easy one, and it saves you money too.

Traditional lightbulbs use loads of electricty, newer ones don’t. This saves you about £7 pounds per bulb per year on your electricty bill. It also reduces your carbon emmisions which contribute the greenhouse effect. The bulbs cost more initially than ordinary bulbs but they pay for themselves within about 18 months becuase of the savings on your electricty bill and becuase they last upto 12 times longer.

Putting this Good Thing into action was fairly easy. The biggest chalenge is making sure you order bulbs with the right connectors. I found BLTDirect to be a good place to buy bulbs in the UK and they have a good guide to which connectors you need.

In our flat where we have 21 light bulb sockets. When I started justthree of these were fluresent tubes which are already pretty efficent. So that left 17 out of 21 bulbs up for replacement. Many of them were of shapes and sizes so I went round with a note pad and made a list of all the bulbs, the current wattage, the connector type, and the position. Then I sat down in front of my computer and put together an order.

I bought 12 or so bulbs which when added to the ones we already had added up to 16 out of 21 bulbs that are energy efficent.

I think the £7 pounds saving figure probably assumes the lights are on fairly often which many of ours aren’t. So lets assume we save about £5 pounds a year per bulb thats still £80 a year!

I did make a few mistakes when buying the bulbs, I ordered a few bulbs with the wrong connector. The great thing is they don’t go to waste, you can give them to someone else and tell them how easy it is to switch and save! Another point to note is that these bulbs do take a while to warm up to full brightness and when they do, some of them can be very bright white light rather than the warmer coloured light from a normal bulb.

The picky among you will note I’ve still got 5 bulbs to go, but I’m working on them. I’ll let you guys know how we fared when we get our electicty bill!

If you are interested in more information on this, perhaps for a more offical source, take a look at the Energy Savings Trust site. Also this BBC hosted article by Matt Prescott explains the current political situation beatifully and goes on to suggest how the market might be manipulated to make purchasing energy saving bulbs cheaper than non energy saving bulbs by taxing the less efficent ones and using the revenue to subsidise the cost of the more efficent ones.

One of my hopes for this blog is to detail things I’m doing to make things better for the world.

That may sound pretentious (and I may cringe myself when I read this at some later date) but I think it is too easy in life to feel totally powerless to bring about change for the better, be it in your personal life, in the state of the environment or the situation in the Middle East.

The thing that bothers me the most at the moment is the state of the environment. I’m not just talking about global warming (although that is what bothers me the most), I’m talking about litter, noise, erosion, bad tourism, ugly buildings, badly designed cycle paths, junk mail and anything else that gets my goat that could be avoided by individuals changing their behavior.

My plan is simple, I’m going to write about one good thing that I’ve done per week that I think is a step in the right direction for the good of everyone. I hope readers will also do them if they agree its a good thing.

Questions?

Well, I’ve made a start … I don’t see why I should say anything useful yet, that will come with time